[PragmaticPulp]

I like the idea in theory, but I can’t entirely agree with the “Green” designation. Putting 12 Raspberry Pis, 12 USB SSDs, 12 switch ports, and cabling and power supplies for all of the above adds up quickly.

From a pure compute-per-watt perspective using typical cloud workloads, I’d still expect a run of the mill shared cloud server to be more efficient. It would also allow for more burst overhead for individual workloads.

This is an interesting option for people who need a specific Raspberry Pi hosted somewhere.

[piaste]

> This is an interesting option for people who need a specific Raspberry Pi hosted somewhere.

What is that use case though? The page says that they only host regular Pis and optionally a USB SSD. So they can't do anything that a regular cloud server can't do - no custom hats, etc.

I have a Pi 4 home server, and the biggest issue right now is that my home upload is a bit weak for remote video streaming. So this product could interest me, in theory - saves me from having to migrate all my data & configuration to a cloud server. But I would rather pay Hetzner a very similar amount of money to get a VPS that's about as powerful as a Pi (probably more) and still have the physical Pi here at home as a fallback.

Maybe there are ARM-specialized, highly distributed tasks for which a fleet of Pis is particularly efficient?

[jo909]

> I have a Pi 4 home server, and the biggest issue right now is that my home upload is a bit weak for remote video streaming.

"To ensure that every Pi at our decentralized locations always has enough network throughput, the uplink and downlink is fixed at 10 Mbps."

Not sure about your use case, but for me that is way less bandwidth than I have at home.

[zamadatix]

Edit: This is in response to the "fleet of Pi's" question, obviously a Mac Mini is not going to be cheaper to rent than a single Pi! The aforementioned VPS route is the better way to go for that case.

Scaleway will give you an 8 core 16GB RAM 256GB SSD M1 Mac Mini for €0.1/h. It may not sound like much of an increase from core count but it is ~10x faster for multicore which means it probably comes out on top for perf/€, perf/Watt, and total perf compared to a rack of Pi 4's for any such distributed ARM use case.

For pure traditional cloud a Graviton2 instance on AWS is probably more green, albeit probably less cost efficient to the user.

[selectodude]

That’s €72/mo. Different price class there.

[zamadatix]

To be clear this isn't an alternative to hosting a single Pi it was in response to the distributed case:

> Maybe there are ARM-specialized, highly distributed tasks for which a fleet of Pis is particularly efficient?

Assuming the task really requires ARM, is perfectly scalable among multiple systems, doesn't require more than 10mbps between the nodes, and doesn't require dedicated control/scheduling nodes (i.e. best case for the Pi's) a fleet in multiples of 10 Pi's per would be $59.90 month each plus the up front cost of the Pi's, power adapters, SSDs, and shipping. And even if you wrote off the up front hardware as on hand it would still be significantly less green to run.

[3xa]

Hi,

"Green", now removed from the title, but still on the landingpage refers to the power used by our data center. Our data centers operate inside wind & solar parks, therefor we only use green energy. If there is no wind or sun we directly purchase green energy. Of course every DC is connected to the public grid for continuous operation.

[AshamedCaptain]

Raspberry Pis may be "green" in that they are cheap, but power efficient they aren't. They have barely any power management support, making their idle power usage higher than even some x86 chips.

[Sebb767]

> making their idle power usage higher than even some x86 chips

What x86 chip can idle on 4W when including RAM and the mainboard?

I have some very low power J1900 boards, but even they idle on ~10W.

[AshamedCaptain]

It's not hard for x86 laptops to idle below 4W (see Surface https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Go-Pentium-6... , even Pro ones with screen on they idle well below 10W). With 10W just for the SoC you get into desktop or gaming laptop territory.

I have a full x86 system that idles at 1.7W _at the wall_ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639929 . This is an off-the-shelf ASUS PN40 mini-desktop, running an N4000, and includes 8GB RAM, a SATA SSD, and Gigabit ethernet, all running and accepting requests.

[KennyBlanken]

> I have a full x86 system that idles at 1.7W _at the wall_

A single stick of DDR1/2/3 ram uses more than that alone.

SATA SSDs are typically 0.5-1W idling.

The mobo chipset, figure at least a few watts

That doesn't even account for CPU idle power consumption.

Whatever you're using for power monitoring isn't accurate. Probably doesn't fully integrate, instead using sampling, and the sampling rate isn't high enough to show true power consumption from your PC's switching PSU.

[AshamedCaptain]

It's DDR3L, not DDR3. Even the active power use of the stick is not going to be > 0.5W. And RAPL/ACPI can show the CPU/chipset (respectively) consumption, and it averages less than 1W. The official ASUS measurement is at ~3.7W https://csr.asus.com/english/file/ErP_PN40.pdf , and that is with Windows, 8 GB stick and 2 SSDs (personally I couldn't get it to idle at less than 6-7W with Windows).

Again: there are laptops that idle at these values, and this is even worse than a CPU laptop -- it's an Atom. Think S0i3... which keeps the RAM (in SR), chipset, and a shitton of things awake and yet consumes way less than 1W.

> Whatever you're using for power monitoring isn't accurate.

Sure (as in: one can never disagree with that), but the point is: it's still at least half the consumption of the Raspberry Pi 4, and lower than the consumption of a Raspberry Pi 3 where I disabled almost everything. For which apparently the measurements match to the 2 digits what I can find online, which I can compare since it's much easier to use the same software-hardware combo.

This is not ARM vs x86. It's just the RPI that is crap regarding power management, since by design _they are not even trying_. They just wanted to be cheap. There are many (ARM and other) CPUs that idle even lower than that. If they wanted to be efficient, they would beat the many year old Atom in an instant. Probably already do in (peak) performance/watt.