Core counts have increased dramatically. The latest AMD server CPUs have up to 192 cores. The Zen1 top model had only 32 cores and that was already a lot compared to Intel. However, the power consumption has also increased: the current top model has a TDP of 500W.

Does absolute power consumption matter or would it not be better to focus on per-core power consumption? Eg running 6 32-core CPUs seems unlikely to be better than 1 192-core.

Yes, per core power consumption or better performance per Watt is usually more relevant than the total power consumption. And 1 high-core CPU is usually better than the same number of cores on multiple CPUs. (That is unless you are trying to maximize memory bandwidth per Watt.)

What I wanted to get at is that the pure core count can be misleading if you care about power consumption. If you don't and just look at performance, the current CPU generations are monsters. But if you care about performance/Watt, the improvement isn't that large. The Zen1 CPU I was talking about had a TDP of 180 W. So you get 6x as many cores, but the power consumption increases by 2.7x.

Makes sense, thanks for the good reply.

a graph showing this against cloud instance costs and aws profits would be funny.

That could be an interesting site when it's done but I couldn't see where you factor in the price of electricity for running bare metal in a 24/7 climate-controlled environment, which I would assume expect is the biggest expense by far.

The first FAQ question addresses exactly that: colocation costs are added to every bare metal item (even storage drives).

Note that this doesn't intend to be used for accounting, but for estimating, and it's good at that. If anything, it's more favorable to the cloud (e.g, no egress costs).

If you're on the cloud right now and BMS shows you can save a lot of money, that's a good indicator to carefully research the subject.