Sandy Bridge consumes that much at full load, but that can also be said of current gen processors (which incidentally usually go even higher).
At idle or low load, Sandy Bridge is plenty economical just sipping power. These aren't Pentium 4s which guzzle power like it's draining Texas of its all its oil even at idle.
My Sandy Bridge i7 2700K is sipping 10W at idle/low load right now, and that's actually lower than my Alder Lake i7 12700K that's sipping 15W at idle/low load. At high loads they go up to 95W and 150W respectively, which still comes out in favor of Sandy Bridge.
"Sipping power" is a bit of an overstatement. Sure, at 35W idle, they were very lower for the time but modern <10nm monolithic die CPUs are way more economically than the older 32nm, 22nm, and 14nm CPUs though. That can't be argued.
A 12th Gen quad core NUC CPU will use at full load what Sandy Bridge quad core uses at idle, while also getting better performance.
There's just no comparison.
A google search on benchmarks and tests.
The numbers I cited earlier were reported by the CPU's package power sensors which were in turn read by LibreHardwareMonitor.
However, painting with broad brushes, Sandy Bridge has modern power management and idles comparably to newer CPUs (a lot better than some modern ones even).
Also an old system is likely in a case that accepts multiple drives. That NUC is not going to have space for my 3.5" storage drives. Yes I could invest in NVME SSD's, but the point of this is low cost and using parts I already have.
I have 10+ old 3.5" HDD's laying around, if one dies I can easily swap it out at zero cost to me and keep my home server going.
We were just comparing CPU power usage. We're going off-road here and splitting hairs trying to cater to the needs of every enthusiast who builds his custom home lab.
Nobody's telling you how you should build your NAS or home lab, but the point about big differences in CPU power consumption across >10 years of progress still stands.
Even with SW only workloads, just look at the geekbench scores I posted.
If a 2W smartphone SoC can offer over 2x the performance of a 95W chip, then it's bit outdated and energy inefficient and maybe time to upgrade to something better and more energy efficient, unless you're tryin to compete in the "who has the most gas-guzzling terminal/youtube machine" competition.
I.e. PC-A might consume 100 watts more than PC-B, but the real efficiency when it comes to you our monthly electric bill is more like 300 to 500 W (in my experience, in a hot area of the country). Those 100 W of heat have to be removed from your home environment to keep whatever Ambient temperature you find comfortable.
Edit-it of course, works in the opposite direction in terms of your heating bill in the cold months of the year (but without the 3X multiplier)
In most of Europe thermodynamics are still applicable, so extra heat from an old inefficient CPU still ends up un your house, raising your ambient temperature and making you uncomfortable (in the summer) regardless if you have AC or not.
Lack of AC doesn't make the problem go away, it just makes it a better case for investing in thermally efficient electronics.
But yes - modern lower power hardware (Apple Silicon, lower power AMD Zen, etc) can be drastically faster than older hardware, at significantly lower power - and massively lower total power consumption for work done.
You can get wins here by making sure even modern hardware is running in the more power efficient part it's perf/watt curve - for example, ECO mode on modern AMD hardware (105W+ to 65W, for instance), reducing the board power limit on GPUs when doing compute (~420W to 225W, for most efficient on my 3090!), etc. You lose remarkably little performance by doing so.
At homes what is more common are ductless split systems, combined with an architecture where you have windows that can be opened when the weather is not that hot.
It is completely idiotic to cool a whole McMansion when the 3 or 4 people inside are occupying no more than 30% of the space most of the time.
Where are you getting these numbers from? Typical central air CoP (Coefficient of Performance) even when it's > 100 F outside is at least 2, typically 3-5. Assuming based on current outdoor temp the CoP is 3, it'll remove 100 W of heat with 33 W of energy. So instead of 100 W -> 300-500 W you're looking at 100 W -> 133 W total.
2x performance in some very specific and narrow benchmark tasks.
The real reason phones are bad at computing tasks is they throttle when put under any sustained load.
3200000000(clock) x 2(DDR) x 2(16-bit channel width) x 4(channels) = 51200000000 bytes/sec or 51.2 GBytes/sec
And I imagine this commenter talking about 8GB RAM, they're assuming not all 4 channels are populated. So one could imagine two channels being populated, 25.6 Gbit/sec, divide by 8 to get bytes, that's then only 3.2GB/s?
My point was only if these old PCs are daily driven on a daily basis as workhorse machines, then the lack of efficiency becomes an sensible issue.
Is that the case for Teams / Zoom & friends, which are what I'd expect to be the most common video decode/encode uses? I'm expecting my 11th gen i7 laptop to become airborne any day now, with the kind of noise it makes on Teams calls.
Anecdotally, my personal zen3u laptop does seem to unload video decoding to the GPU when watching movies, but it still gets fairly warm.
> If you don't care about energy efficiency or it's dirt cheap where you live then that's fine, but FWIW a modern 12th gen Intel Alder-Lake N100 NUC clone with quad E-cores[1] will smoke that
On what do you base this? I've never tried the N100 NUC, but some i5 12th gen with 2 P cores and I forget how many E-cores in a laptop. Compiling Rust, it was comparable to my older gen laptop with the 11th gen i7. Now this is an "U" part in an ultra book, but it's barely faster than a 2013 MBP with an i7, which, if I'm not mistaken, is a 3rd gen core "H" part.
... maybe? Think global. Making CPUs uses an amazing amount of power in making the metallurgical silicon, refining to poly silicon, refining it again to semiconductor grade, refining it again, and then the whole slice polish lithography chain. All of that is still coal powered.
And the chemicals used, and the byproducts created in the chemical manufacture and use, and the amazing quantities of water that are used in the earlier steps of the chain.
Unless you're getting your electricity by burning rainforests, it seems better for the environment to avoid causing new chips to be made, by continuing to use old ones.
You're also paying for the extra electricity the old CPU uses out of your pocket, plus the extra time it takes to finish certain tasks, lowering your productivity loosing you money.
If you value energy efficiency and productivity, you can upgrade and flip the old CPU on the second hand market to someone for whom the energy efficiency and productivity gains are less important than using an old cheap CPU instead of buying a new expesnive one. Win-win.
It's a very safe bet that, assuming you do significant work with the processor, that a modern processor will more than make up for its inefficiency.
On the environmental virtue side electronics have embodied energy usage that can surpass the lifetime electrical consumption especially if the devices are not always on.
And Europeans are definitely feeling the CoL increase.
If it uses as much or more power when busy and you're just using it to push more frames in a video game, you're probably not going to singlehandedly bring about the next ice age. Same if the low utilization system power is similar and you spend most of the time messing around on the internet or editing code occasionally punctuated by a compile job, even if that does run faster.
As the saying in the car enthusiast community goes: "It's not about the miles per gallon, it's the smiles per gallon."
Backwards compatibility to what, MS-DOS? People usually complain about forward compatibility regarding TPM, never had any issues with backwards compatibility on the last chips.
How is more money in your pocket virtue signaling?
My old fx6300 system though pulled +250 watts just existing lol.
When I was running the stack of SFF business machines I was using vastly more power to cool the room than I was to power the machines.
If you don't care about energy efficiency or it's dirt cheap where you live then that's fine, but FWIW a modern 12th gen Intel N100 180 Euro NUC clone off Amazon will smoke that, with a TDP of only 10W, and at EU energy prices, the energy savings will make up the extra cost.
I get and support the whole reuse/repair/recycle mantra, but just like with daily driving old cars, at some point it's worth letting them go and upgrading your daily driver to something new and efficient which you can also reuse/repair/recycle, as it's just not worth daily driving in 2023 anymore such old gas-guzzling tower PCs with old CPUs that consume ~100W just to offer less than half of the performance of a modern smartphone[1][2] except for bragging rights online on who has the oldest ruining CPU, or if you don't care about your energy usage.
For example, a modern CPU encoding/decoding a video stream would use way less power thanks to its newer video decoder/encoder hardware IP blocks than a very old CPU going on full blast to SW decode/encode the video stream.
So, there's a balance where you need to think how much of the environment would I be saving by keeping using very old hardware instead of throwing it away, and how much would I be saving it by upgrading to something much more efficient and using that for longer, and at some point the balance tips to the latter.
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i7-3770k
[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2179368
Edit: Why the downvotes though? You know I'm right. Is it because I spoiled the party by bringing in facts and information where everyone started a competition on who has the oldest running CPU?