[geeks] Ran the numbers - V240

[Lionel Peterson]

No, I have not looked at it, but my progression was always prefaced by trying
to use what I have:

I started with Sun V240, because I had it, so hardware cost $0, but
electricity would be $300/yr.

Then I thought about buying a small pile of RPis, but despite trivial
electricity costs, the hardware would be about a $300 Buy-in.

Then I remembered my Xeon 1U Server, sitting idle - it consumes half the power
of the V240, and has a hardware cost < $10 (to put a surplus SSD and a surplus
1TB laptop drive in a single 3.5" drive space.

Lionel

> On Nov 10, 2017, at 12:16 PM, Josh Snyder <josh at imagestream.com> wrote:
>
> Have you looked at any of the newer Xeon-D solutions? I have been playing
around with a Supermicro Xeon-D "server" at work, 8 cores @ 2.2Ghz all for
about 35 watts of power. The board also includes 2 10GBASE-T 10Gbit interfaces
that if you disables them in the UFI it drops the power usage down to about 27
watts. Granted this is new hardware and not exactly cheap but performance per
watt is rather impressive.
>
>        Josh
>
>
>> On 11/10/2017 12:05 PM, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> I *think* the RAM is the same as the T5220 and the PE1950 systems take
(there
>> are two common, yet incompatible, types of FBDIMMs). If that is the case,
>> expanding RAM to full 24 Gig is trivial, RAM DIMMs are plentiful on eBay -
but
>> still, it has 16 Gig now, that's not bad.
>> The quad-core CPU, X5270 (I think) is rated at 50 Watts each, so that is a
>> pretty efficient quad-core CPU.
>> Also, I picked up, but have not started reading, a copy of "The Pentium
>> Chronicles", by Robert Colwell, and "Unix Life" at a used book store, so I
>> look forward to learning more about the families of Pentiums...
>> Lionel
>>>> On Nov 10, 2017, at 11:46 AM, Jonathan Patschke <jp at celestrion.net>
wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, 10 Nov 2017, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Actually, what I thought was a quad-core Xeon system with HT turned on
>>>> is actually a dual quad-core Xeon system that  can take up to 24 Gig
>>>> RAM. All at about 175 Watts/hr.
>>>
>>> The Tyan version of that board is what I collapsed all my RISC systems
>>> into.  Clovertown / Blackford was the first Intel platform that could
>>> compete with RISC in MIPS/watt as well as it could in MIPS/dollar.
>>>
>>> Shame about the FB-DIMMs, though.  That was nearly as fun as the RDRAM
>>> debacle of the Pentium 4 era.  And shame about BIOS and all the legacy
>>> PC/AT crap that hadn't been flushed out of the mainstream by then, too.
>>>
>>> But that platform in particular is where I noticed the PC finally growing
>>> up to become a real computer.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jonathan Patschke
>>> Austin, TX
>>> USA
>>> _______________________________________________
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