Comment by dangus
3 hours ago
I don’t know why you’d assume that an older system is lower footprint.
If you’ve got something consuming 100 watts average over your 24 hour period, and your electricity costs 20 cents per kWh, you’re already spending almost as much as a Claude subscription.
Just on electricity, this assumes your hardware never fails and you never incur any additional costs.
There’s a big reason why newer more efficient hardware is in demand. Something that’s 10+ years old has drastically worse performance per watt.
Obviously I am not saying to throw away your old hardware as a rule but there is a point where some of this old stuff just isn’t even worth running.
The reason more performance/watt is in demand because a datacenter can't suddenly draw twice as much power.
I have two LARGE Xeon systems of this era that I used to use when I was heavily involved with Kubernetes and needed to build out a home lab. One is 2x Xeon w/ 256 GB of ram, and one is 1x Xeon w/ 512GB of ram. Both are slow as dogs, and both of them take up at least 150+ watts with only one power supply. My 12th gen Intel Nuc is so, so much faster and efficient. I'm recycling the Xeon systems.
Xeon is a group of products with really varying specs. There is no indication of which XEONs. Also new consumer CPUs often have really small internal caches.
You mention lower footprint but then make a cost comparison against Claude subscription pricing.
Claude subscription pricing is a broken way to consider footprint.