[josteink]

> In an office setting the difference would be unnoticeable

If you have a hall full of developers, having lots of noisy PCs can be annoying.

Where I work, we optimized for more silent PCs, because all these things do add up, and given the perf/watt-ratio you can get out of modern CPUs, there's no reason for people to need to have noisy PCs.

Even at home, optimizing watt-usage, even for a desktop build, is not completely without merits. All my future projects are planned as fanless as possible. And I know others who do the same. And if Intel can't deliver that, they'll just go buy something Arm-based, like an Rpi 3, which these days are getting good enough to actually do production loads.

I'm not even getting close to wanting a system where the CPU alone can draw 400+ watts.

[paulmd]

> an Rpi 3, which these days are getting good enough to actually do production loads

They really aren't, CPU performance is really irrelevant given the RPi's architectural weaknesses. USB was never meant as a system bus and everything has to loop through the kernel stack. Having every single peripheral hanging off a single USB 2.0 bus is crippling for performance. A Pi can't even serve a share at full 100 mbit speed due to bus contention let alone do anything more intensive.

It's very similar to one of Apple's more famous goofs, the Performa 5200/6200 with its left-hand/right-hand bus split that forces the CPU to handle everything.

http://lowendmac.com/2014/power-mac-and-performa-x200-road-a...

Some of the clone boards have USB 3.0, SATA, gigabit ethernet, etc and are much better performers in practice despite having slower CPUs "on paper". Or there are little mini-PCs using 5-15W laptop processors that are really nice and run x86 distros/binaries.

All of these are at roughly comparable TCOs to a Pi (they include things like AC adapters that must be purchased separately for the Pi). The RPi is a bad choice for server usage.

[josteink]

> They really aren't, CPU performance is really irrelevant given the RPi's architectural weaknesses

Obviously "production loads" is an undefined term and as such we can discuss infinitely back and forth exactly how much these cheap ARM machines can actually handle.

I also didn't mean to single out the Rpi3 as a universal performer, optimal for everything out there.

My point was that I'm seeing an increased amount of people who are happy with what these cheap boards can do, who 10 years ago would have been forced to buy a server of sorts to cover the same needs.

So now they don't buy servers. Instead they buy cheap, tiny and fan-less ARM-based machines and they're perfectly happy. They even think running ARM is cooler than running Intel, so it's something they brag about.

I'm absolutely not saying I'm going to replace my company's server-farm or my dev-computer with these anytime soon, but Intel cannot completely ignore the power-efficiency aspect either if they want to keep their dominance in the market.