Low-power PC

[Digit]

AMD versus Atom:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/Atom-Athl ... 31253.html

[Digit]

A new chapter added to this never ending quest for lower power usage
I built a new Intel i3 based server because some of my hardware is acting a bit strange lately.
The power usage reduction of >50% is getting me into the sub-30W range, but still with lots of processing power.
I think I can lower power usage even more, but I'm waiting for some parts to arrive...

http://blog.hekkers.net/2011/03/16/inte ... below-30w/

[Bastiaan]

Robert, nice setup. I am curious how much difference it makes when you pull half of the memory out. I found that memory is effecting usages a lot now other parts are more efficient.
Can you alos make a overview of the total costs?

Bastiaan

[Alexander]

@Robert: Interresting material for you: http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/60 ... wijs!.html (read other posts)

[TANE]

Nice work Robert.

My next step for a HA servers is make a move to a tablet
like yourtablet 2000 Atom 455, 32GB SSD

This depends on the usage. My hope is that the usage will be dropped below 6 watt

I'm going to use this for
Homeseer
Plugwise
Irtrans
Itunes
HSTouch

[Digit]

@Bastiaan: Total costs incl. PicoPSU is around 950 Euro; 50% of the costs are the 2 SSD's.

@Alexander: Thanks, I read (small parts) of that thread last week, really impressive! For me personally this goes a bit too far; with all this teaking I wouldn't have time for anything else anymore I guess

[Digit]

Enver,

When there's a tablet on which I can run multiple (at least 5) VMs, with 2 NICs, >200GB local storage, I will consider it
We'll explore the possibilities for that again in 3 years or so

[Alexander]

Ah okay... This is something i thought you would love to read or change

[TANE]

no change for vm on a tablet at the moment..maybe in few years..
i3 is the best solution

[RDNZL]

This is my new domotiga live/development server, small physical size.

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Intel i3 540 CPU @ 3.06 GHz
ECS H55H-I mITX motherboard
8GB RAM (2 x KVR1066D3N7/4G)
OCZ Vertex2 60GB SSD
PicoPSU 80 Watt
Chieftec BT-02B MiniTower, mITX
Running Ubuntu Maverick 64 Bits.


Power usage is between 25-27 watt, without any bios tweaks or other optimizations, measured with plugwise plug.
I think the ECS board has less power saving features than the MSI's have.

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CPU0: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU 540 @ 3.07GHz stepping 05
Booting Node   0, Processors  #1 #2 #3
Brought up 4 CPUs
Total of 4 processors activated (24469.72 BogoMIPS).


It replaces my Asus eeebox which uses 18-20 watt, but was getting a bit slow with latest Ubuntu Maverick, it also had only 1GB of memory.
The Asus scored around 5500 BogoMIPS total.

[RDNZL]

@Robert: Interresting material for you: http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/60 ... wijs!.html (read other posts)

Lol, just read what he did, look at the hardware-mods list on this linked page, I think my soldering skills are above average, but this is insane...

[RDNZL]

I love linux..

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PowerTOP 1.13   (C) 2007 - 2010 Intel Corporation

Collecting data for 5 seconds
     PowerTOP version 1.13      (C) 2007 Intel Corporation

Cn                Avg residency       P-states (frequencies)
C0 (cpu running)        ( 0.4%)         3.07 Ghz     0.2%
polling           0.0ms ( 0.0%)         2.94 Ghz     0.0%
C1 mwait          0.2ms ( 0.0%)         2.81 Ghz     0.0%
C2 mwait          5.3ms (40.3%)         2.67 Ghz     0.0%
C3 mwait          1.5ms (59.3%)         1200 Mhz    99.8%

Wakeups-from-idle per second : 462.4    interval: 15.0s
no ACPI power usage estimate available

Top causes for wakeups:
  53.4% (1202.3)   USB device 2-1.1 : FT232R USB UART (FTDI)
  44.4% (1000.4)   [ehci_hcd:usb2] <interrupt>
   0.1% (  2.3)D  mysqld
   0.7% ( 15.5)   [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
   0.4% (  8.1)   nxagent
   0.3% (  6.5)   gbx2
   0.2% (  3.5)   [kernel core] hrtimer_start (tick_sched_timer)
   0.1% (  2.1)   [eth0] <interrupt>
   0.1% (  2.0)   [kernel core] clocksource_watchdog (clocksource_watchdog)
   0.1% (  1.7)   gnome-terminal
   0.1% (  1.2)   nxnode
   0.1% (  1.1)   [ahci] <interrupt>
   0.0% (  1.0)   gvfs-afc-volume
   0.0% (  0.5)   nxserver
   0.0% (  0.5)   gnome-settings-
   0.0% (  0.4)   update-notifier
   0.0% (  0.3)   ping

The program 'mysqld' is writing to file 'devices.MYI' on /dev/sda1.
This prevents the disk from going to powersave mode.


[Digit]

With 5 VMs moved to the i3 server it's now consuming 37W. A PicoPSU will arrive some day soon and I still have to disable some things I don't use. Undervolting etc. is not something I want to experiment with on this machine; it's too "important" for that
I think I can reduce it back to around 30W or a bit more.
To be continued...

[Digit]

Today I replaced the PSU with the PicoPSU, resulting in a power usage that dropped from 37 to 32W.
My goal when I started this was 30-35W, so I'm satisfied with the result.
If I could only get rid of 1 Windows XP VM which consumes a lot of CPU;
The process which consumes the most CPU time in there is the Plugwise Source...
Could probably save me some more Watts!

[yjb]

Hi,

Just wondering, what is the base OS that you are running. i.e. are you running a Windows system and on top of that Windows/Linux VM's or a Linux system with Windows/Linux on top of that?

And, of course, why is one option preferred over the other?