Proposal: Let's drop i386

[Philipp Kern]

On 5/12/18 5:31 PM, Dimitri John Ledkov wrote:
> HDDs consume more energy than SSDs; [...]

Unless it's NVMe.

> similarly newer (faster clock/dynamicly clocked, and operating at a lower
> voltage / amps) RAM
> consume less energy.

Didn't RAM power consumption go up with frequency and especially as now
everyone tries to get more and more RAM into their boxes, consuming more
power?

> If newer platforms were not more power efficient, we would not see public
> clouds / datacentres upgrading their platforms as aggressively as they do.

Well, there are other considerations as well. Floor space. The fact that
you need more compute power and hence you add machines rather than
replacing them. What you really want in these environments is
performance per watt, of course. Outside of these cloud environments
rarely anyone runs their machines that hot. In which case you care more
about idle consumption.

Given that people were talking about replacing machines with new ones
just for environment purposes, there's also something to be said about
the e-waste generated by that. If people keep their power-hungry CPUs
not continuously running but dutifully power them off if not needed, the
trade-off is probably more on the generating waste side than the "we
need to convert everyone to more efficient CPUs"[1].

Kind regards
Philipp Kern

[1] Low consumption also sometimes backfires. Low water consumption now
requires the utilities to waste more water on their side to keep the
pipes operational, also raising prices.