This was pretty beneficial as the idle draw was about 55W.
Over 7 months, this would be have been around 275kWh: almost 3 times the reported consumption of 98kWh!
So idle draw is a very important factor, which I think is too often ignored (this is a perfect counter example, where it was taken into account: congrats!)
The 5950X is a Zen 3 CPU, it's possible that it's improved since then. Not sure if it's because it's a 28W part, or Zen 5, but my laptop with Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU idles around 4W, with the (OLED) screen on (according to btop).
I can't predict how granular the data would be, but if you are curious about which hardware components contribute to that idle draw, I have a tool that may help.
Very cool to see this measured! I'd love to see things like build jobs get queued until lots of solar energy was available, then executed until the renewable energy went away. I know this was done somewhat manually in this case, but automating that would be really cool. Build jobs are a great opportunity to shift work through time to when energy is abundant.
The solar system on our house is 15 years old and I have no insight into generation aside from looking at the little LCD on the inverter itself. However, I live in a sunny location (Sunshine Coast, Australia), so you'd get a long way from just having the builder shutdown a hour or two before sunset and and come back on an hour or two after sunrise.
That makes sense. I intended this as a broader "I wish we did this work shifting for most batch processing" rather than as any criticism of your setup. I think solar build servers in the same vein as https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/ would be really cool, and probably the best available way to handle building distro packages within an energy budget.
oliverpool | 7 hours ago
Over 7 months, this would be have been around 275kWh: almost 3 times the reported consumption of 98kWh!
So idle draw is a very important factor, which I think is too often ignored (this is a perfect counter example, where it was taken into account: congrats!)
[OP] wezm | 7 hours ago
Thank you. I was a bit surprised that the idle draw is that high. Certainly shows how much there is to gain from getting that value down.
masklinn | 5 hours ago
For all that they do well idle draw is definitely an issue of AMD CPUs.
[OP] wezm | 4 hours ago
The 5950X is a Zen 3 CPU, it's possible that it's improved since then. Not sure if it's because it's a 28W part, or Zen 5, but my laptop with Ryzen AI 7 350 CPU idles around 4W, with the (OLED) screen on (according to
btop).whereswaldon | 4 hours ago
I can't predict how granular the data would be, but if you are curious about which hardware components contribute to that idle draw, I have a tool that may help.
[OP] wezm | 4 hours ago
That's a very interesting looking project. I'll have to try it out when I have a moment.
whereswaldon | 4 hours ago
Very cool to see this measured! I'd love to see things like build jobs get queued until lots of solar energy was available, then executed until the renewable energy went away. I know this was done somewhat manually in this case, but automating that would be really cool. Build jobs are a great opportunity to shift work through time to when energy is abundant.
[OP] wezm | 4 hours ago
The solar system on our house is 15 years old and I have no insight into generation aside from looking at the little LCD on the inverter itself. However, I live in a sunny location (Sunshine Coast, Australia), so you'd get a long way from just having the builder shutdown a hour or two before sunset and and come back on an hour or two after sunrise.
whereswaldon | 3 hours ago
That makes sense. I intended this as a broader "I wish we did this work shifting for most batch processing" rather than as any criticism of your setup. I think solar build servers in the same vein as https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/ would be really cool, and probably the best available way to handle building distro packages within an energy budget.
dvogel | 2 hours ago
Gentoo enters the chat