On Wed, Aug 07, 2019 at 05:12:20PM +0200, deloptes wrote:
Michael Stone wrote:Newer server hardware is much more power efficient and will draw very little power when idle. This is one of the drawbacks to saving money by using old hardware. (You can still use old hardware, just be sure it's new enough that it's from the era when power efficiency became a thing.)I am not sure who you are answering to.
What's confusing about the attribution and text that I quoted?
I recently looked at HP DL360 and DL380 Gen10. Yes indeed they are more power efficient compared to Gen9 in terms they provide more calculation cycles for the same power, but this can not be compared to a PC.
HP g9 and g10 are both well past the dawn of the era of low idle consumption so there aren't huge differences to be found there. The base power consumption of that class of system is rather higher than a small desktop primarily because of redundancy and BMC (IPMI/remote management)--not the CPU. A different server chassis & motherboard choice will result in much lower base consumption, if the redundancy and remote management aren't needed. But even the HP DLs of the g9/g10 era can idle at around half the 85W you mentioned. (Whereas a comparable g6 might have idled over 100W, and even older servers idled at 300 or 400W.) The point is that it's not correct to assume that a "server" will have a high idle consumption, and if power efficiency is a goal it's achievable through reasonable selection of components. (Conversely, a "desktop" may have higher power consumption if it has a beefy GPU, and older desktops have much higher idle power just like older servers.)