[GRLUG] Net-top as server?

[Michael Mol]

Bob Kline wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Adam Tauno Williams 
> <awilliam at whitemice.org <mailto:awilliam at whitemice.org>> wrote:
> 
>      > > I think some of the P4's consumed
>      > > 125W.  Maybe the special edition ones.
>      > > But the clock speeds are high, and they
>      > > eat power.  At $125 one could use some
>      > > of the savings to give to the power company...
>      > The NetBurst architecture is pretty bad at a performance-per-watt
>     basis.
>      >   However, the Atom architecture is no angel; While researching
>     building
>      > a carputer, I was warned away from Atom-based boards as they "ran
>     too hot."
> 
>     We have an Atom based netbook at work -  about 2.5 hours batter life.
>     My 17" laptop - about the same or better.  I'm not impressed by the
>     power claims of those things either [although in all likelihood I have a
>     bigger battery].  But still not impressive;  for what you sacrifice with
>     a netbook I'd expect something like six to eight hours of battery life.
> 
>      > But, again, if we're talking about simple file serving, your CPU
>     demands
>      > are going to be very, very low, and the power-consumed-while-idle is
>      > extremely low for any x86 CPU designed after the Pentium (As in, the
>      > thing that would have been called 80586 had Intel not lost their
>      > trademark case against Cyrix), I think.
> 
>     Yep, assuming you verify that power-saving features are enabled and
>     working.  Recent LINUX kernels/distros seem to do a decent job
>     out-of-the-box but I'd still double check.  Also there are lots of
>     components other than the CPU & planar, most importantly the power
>     supply or brick.
> 
> 
> Indeed.  The low price HP netbook unit
> has just RAM and flash.  One might think
> it would go all day on a battery charge.
> 
> And one would be wrong...

I suspect there might be a market for ultra-low-power fileserving.  I 
wonder how far one could get with, e.g. a Gumstix attached to a Firewire 
or SATA drive, with the goal being saturation of a 100Mb/s Ethernet 
connection for data transfer.  Gumstix is based on ARM, which has a long 
history of embedded and mobile use.