[K12OSN] Life after LTSP

Jeff Siddall news at siddall.name
Tue Nov 9 16:25:19 UTC 2010


On 11/08/2010 10:07 PM, Robert Arkiletian wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 12:59 PM, Jeff Siddall <news at siddall.name> wrote:
>> On 11/08/2010 03:27 PM, Robert Arkiletian wrote:
>>> In my opinion,  the days of LTSP are numbered. For a few different reasons.
>>
>> Yes and no.  See my comments inline.
>>
>>> 1)
>>> hardware is so cheap now. You can buy a brand new power efficient and
>>> fast  desktop system for about $200 (not including monitor).  Thin
>>> clients are actually *more* expensive now.
>>
>> Yes, hardware is petty cheap but even the most power efficient desktop
>> systems are about 5 X the power of a typical thin client.  Over the life
>> of the client that can exceed the hardware cost.  Plus any fanless
>> system is still a slow systems, and LTSP can make those slow fanless
>> clients feel like fast noisy desktops.
> 
> I am going to measure my clients power usage tomorrow. I have Dell
> Opitiplex dual core Celeron e1400 (2Ghz) cpu with Intel Q43 chipset.
> and 2GB ram. Wondering if anyone has measured the power usage of a
> true thin client (eg. Atom) system.

Yes, definitely.  I measure the power consumption of all my systems.

My typical Atom based clients are D945GSEJTs and they run about 14 W at
the plug.  The board itself is spec'd somewhere in the 12 W range.

A very low power desktop system with a 45 W TDP single core Sempron
LE-1200, M2N PV-VM board and 80 GB Seagate ATA HD still runs at 57 W
idle, 86 W at 100% CPU.  The hard drive runs about 9 W so you can remove
that much for a diskless system.

By comparison, a relatively modern Phenom II X4 940, with dual Seagate
250 GB SATA runs at 71 W idle and 171 W with the CPU running 100%

Jeff




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