[ih] Greener computing

[Dave Taht]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 12:26 PM Toerless Eckert <tte at cs.fau.de> wrote:
>
> Dave:
>
> The sad reality is that older hardware, whether router or PCs uses
> more jule of energy per Megabit. So, in most cases it does pay off energy
> wise to buy recent hardware.

While the total energy/megabit might have improved, in general,
devices are eating more
energy than they were a decade back, I used to be able to run
wireless-n at well below 2w,
and more recent devices are well past 8-12w, admittedly able to push
10x more traffic. Idle numbers, I haven't looked at in a while.

Secondly, it seems to take at least 3, maybe closer to 7, for each new
2 year advance in technology
for the software to catch up. I have (formerly) cerowrt (now openwrt)
boxes in the field that have
been mounted on poles and even trees, for over 10 years, just with
steady software upgrades, and
no real demand for more bandwidth - 150Mbits, with good queuing, remains enough.

so factoring in labor, unreliability, security, makes that proposal
pretty green, IMHO. Plus I don't have figures on the costs of spilling
all those electronics into the ground. The power supplies alone...

>
> In the leading german home routers, there is even an option to switch
> ports to 100Mbps instead of 1Gbps for energy savings. Alas, the energy
> saving for that is only 20%, so customers have a hard decision point.
>
> I would assume that energy saving in PC/router hardware will be something
> users will look a lot more into in the coming years. So there may be
> some good logic to stick to old hardware and hope an upgrade in 3 years
> will be a lot more energy saving than one now.

To me - "energy saving" is mostly industry code for "more unfixible
offloads from the main cpu", and an EE employment act. Vastly prefer
simple, open source, code and a bare minimum of those crippling
offloads, with enough (power saving) cores, much more is feasible.

/me hides

IF we engineered stuff for a 8-15 year field life, and got off this 2
upgrade cycle it would be a better world.
>
> Btw: If you're interested to discuss more of energy saving in networking,
> then maybe chime in on the "recipe at ietf.org" mailing list, this is an old
> list thart became stale, but a bunch of us at ietf114 felt it was the easiest
> available list to discuss energy in networkin related interests (maybe up to
> a point where someone in IETF leadership thinks a better/newer list would be
> appropriate).
>
> Cheers
>     Toerless
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 01, 2022 at 12:12:42PM -0700, Dave Taht via Internet-history wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 11:51 AM Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond via
> > Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On 01/09/2022 18:41, Bob Purvy wrote:
> > > > I think by the 90s he's on a PC, but I haven't really said anywhere.
> > > > Definitely he's gotta try those AOL coasters.
> > >
> > > Remember it was floppy 3 1/2 in disks first which were terrible as
> > > coasters, only to become more useful when they switched to CDs. That
> > > being said I really hope these ended up somehow elsewhere than in a
> > > landfill as so many were produced - see
> > > https://nowiknow.com/remember-all-those-aol-cds-there-were-more-than-you-think/
> > >
> > > I wonder how that kind of production would fare in today's
> > > environmentally conscious world....
> >
> > I kind of feel that way about home routers. There are easily 10x more
> > of those than are turned on, that could be upgraded to open firmware,
> > enabled with ipv6, bufferbloat fixed, made more reliable and secure.
> > Instead they languish in junk bins or landfills. I keep hoping to find
> > a charitably suited VC (hah!) willing to back this concept:
> >
> > https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T21on7g1MqQZoK91epUdxLYFGdtyLRgBat0VXoC9e3I/edit
> >
> > With the current supply chain problems everywhere, perhaps people will
> > relearn how to be frugal.
> >
> > Recently an ISP I work with reflashed 700 "obsolete" mikrotik
> > wireless-n routers to current openwrt and is giving them away as meshy
> > APs. These are well built, and with current software, remain useful
> > for another decade, at least.
> >
> > I haven't bought a "new" computer in years. Desktops (with enough ram)
> > got good enough for me a decade ago.
> >
> > > Best,
> > >
> > > Olivier
> > > --
> > > Internet-history mailing list
> > > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > FQ World Domination pending: https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/state_of_fq_codel/
> > Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
> > --
> > Internet-history mailing list
> > Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> > https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history



-- 
FQ World Domination pending: https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/state_of_fq_codel/
Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC