related article from a few years ago about the Z400:
https://boilingsteam.com/gaming-on-a-cheap-xeon-the-hp-z400-...
My old workstation cost me a 14” MacBook Pro in power in 5 years.
Plus you can get new in box Lenovo mini PCs with 11th gen i5 in for less than the price of a second hand Xeon desktop that’s actually usable now. They pull average 30 watts.
The point is you can’t go “the environment” and throw half the concerns out of the window. It’s way more nuanced than that.
I've actually was able to turn off all heaters during winter and heat my house using computers only! I'd say, "higher" TDP of older CPU was really an advantage here. And, let's be real, new high performance CPUs arent low-TDP either (270W for new AMDs), or GPUs (350W range for high end gaming card).
So, I'd really say it's environmentally friendlier to use waste heat as house heating than using "space heaters" only. (I really do have to heat using electricity, as I don't have gas nor any other source.)
In summer what to you do with that excess heat?
Far more nuanced than trite calculations chosen to back up your conclusion.
Also you’re rebasing the argument on a new $4000 spend when you can spend $400 on a mini PC with the same performance as an old Xeon as suggested.
Also, $400 mini PC have performance nowhere near workstation, since RAM only costs more, not even thinking about gaming GPU or price of decent SSDs and HDDs.
What did I do with excess heat? Opened window and turned off POWER8 energy hog.
The i5-11500T has better single and multi thread performance.
Sure you won’t get an RTX in it but that’s a 1% case really when we’re talking software engineering.
That’s a hell of a lot better value proposition than a 5+ year old Xeon which is what we’re seeing suggested here.
GPU with 2GB of VRAM is not much today, my 4k desktop consumes 1.6G vram and i'm not even running any game.
Midrange machines <1000€ from Lenovo and HP make great workhorses at a fraction of the price.
What desktop is that? I ran Windows 11 desktop with youtube and bluray rips fine even while allocating only 512MB of VRAM, though the more you allocate it the more it will use, to cache and speed up various frequently used apps, but even with 512MB it still worked fine.
An average build is more likely in the range of $1250 +/- 250$
2018 and newer server chips may have better low-power idle mode support.
Even if it does idle at 170w, the build was less than $2k, it has 50 cores, 384GB ram, tons of storage.. 1 year uptime, so sick! Has not let me down yet! Even if the mobo croaks, it's easy to source a cost-effective replacement from fleabay.
110W "idle" with firefox running + few opengl programs.
160W at steam startup, then it jumps between 120W and 160W. It stabilizes at 110W in about 2 minutes.
130-230W when compiling emacs (takes about 30 seconds).
150W when loading Facebook in Firefox. Then stable at 110W again.
175W-180W running Prison Architect. Very safe to add another 220W when running GPU heavy game (thats not very relevant here, new GPUs consumes ~same or more power).
I'd say my "randomly guessed" 130W amortized is pretty OK. And remember, this guess was for reference only, scale it to your needs.
Of course it can get higher when having a lot of things up and running, with a lot of active tabs in firefox.
But we don't live in that world. So they are not.
Yet here we remain, whining about why it can never work.
Economics, the leadership and prominent members of its social network, were all too willing to rubberstamp the whims of the "elites", future of the human race be damned.
Economics the "science" is a lot like the police "union", the only acceptable union to the right because it keeps them in place, while economics the "science" is acceptable because it justifies their position and wealth.
I'm not being snippy; I honestly don't know. Personally, if I need a solution that's good for a number of years, I'd go for a new, efficient computer rather than reuse an old toaster.
Manufacturing a computer:
* 326 kg CO2e: 13-inch MacBook Pro, 128GB storage
* 475 kg CO2e: 15-inch Dell Precision 5530, 256GB storage
* 620 kg CO2e: 16-inch MacBook Pro, 1TB storage
Using it:
* 4g CO2e per hour on 13-inch MacBook Pro
* 6g CO2e per hour on 16-inch MacBook Pro
* 20g CO2e per hour on average-efficient laptop
* 98g CO2e per hour on desktop computer with screen
* 130g CO2e per hour on gaming PC with screen
The figures for using it are based on the US grid's typical mix of coal, renewables, nuclear, etc. In places with a greener grid, such as the UK, the figures are different (there's a different edition of the book for the US and UK version, and possibly other regions as well.)
So we don't have figures for the emissions for a Xeon machine, either in manufacturing or usage. And these figures are estimates, of course, not precise measurements. But they help us to get a good picture of the scale of the impact.
Let's assume that you use your computer 12 hours a day, 365 days a year. On a standard gaming PC with a screen, that'd be 569400g CO2e per year, or 569kg. The big question then is how much more inefficient is a Xeon machine than a standard gaming PC. If the Xeon machine emits 1.33x more than a standard gaming PC, that'd put its yearly usage emissions at 757kg CO2e, so if you used your machine for 5 years, than the difference in emissions would be 940kg CO2e between the Xeon and standard gaming PC, which would probably be enough to justify buying a new machine. But if it's only 1.1x more inefficient, than that difference would be 285 kg, not nearly enough to justify a new machine (and probably still the case even if you use the machine for 10 years.)
Ultimately, I'm not sure that we have the information necessary to definitively answer this, but all other things being equal, I'm skeptical that the CPU alone will make an enormous difference in power draw in day to day usage. A newer CPU will be more efficient when at 100% usage, but does it draw significantly less power when at idle? I don't know. But if anyone else has found any information that could help, I'd love to check it out. That said, there are plenty of second-hand machines that are more efficient than a Xeon machine. Once there are no second-hand efficient machines left, it'd be worthwhile to dig in deep on the emissions of old Xeon machines versus newer more efficient machines, but right now you can just buy used and refurbished efficient machines, so I'd probably just recommend that.
It’s also the opposite older equipment for servers. There are lower tdps for older equipment and for a haswell or broadwell it may use 20-30% less energy than a typical server sku. The compute per watt has increased, but the power draw of modern server cpus are probably much higher than you would expect.