[Freedombox-discuss] Energy efficient Intel server

[Rob van der Hoeven]

On Tue, 2012-03-27 at 20:38 -0700, Dave Taht wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 7:25 PM, Sandy Harris <sandyinchina at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>         On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 10:36 PM, Rob van der Hoeven
>         <robvanderhoeven at ziggo.nl> wrote:
>         
>         > Last week i build a new Intel Pentium system that is very
>         energy
>         > efficient. Idle power consumption is just 23 Watt, max power
>         consumption
>         > is 53 Watt (no graphics). It can be used as a FreedomBox
>         server/general
>         > purpose PC or both...
>         
> 
> This uses the phrase 'energy efficient' in a way I'm not familiar.
> 
> The dreamplug boxes draw 5w. What phrase can be used to distinguish
> the two?

I use MIPS/Watt to measure energy efficiency. Low power devices can be
very energy inefficient if they also have a poor performance. 

I host my website on an ARM system that only uses 10 W (idle). It has
the same processor/clock-speed as the DreamPlug. This system is very low
power but it can only just cope with the load. To give you an example:
Generating my homepage takes about 2.5 seconds. This is not wrong, it's
still acceptable. To measure the performance of my new system, i decided
to test a small project i'm working on. This project is a no-database
version of my blog programmed in python (currently version 0.01). I
compared homepage generation on both my ARM and my Intel system. 

Results:

ARM   - 25 Pages/second
Intel - 800 Pages/second

In this test the Intel system has over 30 times more performance. (Note,
this is not a "hello world" test, the Intel system managed to use half
the bandwidth of my gigabit LAN)

Rob.
http://freedomboxblog.nl