News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?. Parent comment

Re:Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? by sidewndr46 on Friday July 04, 2025 @12:42PM (#44465978)
how did you get a 6500T to idle so low? Is that CPU power or total system power? I have a T part from the next generation, I don't remember the exact model. It's low but it isn't that low.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? by PhilipRoman on Friday July 04, 2025 @03:48PM (#44467336)
Total system power (as in, drawn from the outlet)

I didn't do any significant customizations, it runs Alpine Linux. Here is my powertop output:

    Summary: 139.6 wakeups/second,  0.0 GPU ops/seconds, 0.0 VFS ops/sec and 0.9% CPU use
                Usage       Events/s    Category       Description
            100.0%                      Device         Audio codec hwC0D0: Realtek
            480.6 µs/s      38.3        Timer          tick_nohz_handler
            469.0 µs/s      24.6        Timer          hrtimer_wakeup
            330.0 µs/s      23.2        Process        [PID 2121] [irq/132-iwlwifi]
            281.2 µs/s      10.1        Process        [PID 3278] containerd --config /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.toml
             28.9 µs/s       9.5        kWork          toggle_allocation_gate
             52.4 µs/s       7.5        Timer          inactive_task_timer
            279.3 µs/s       4.6        Process        [PID 3279] containerd --config /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.toml
            363.9 µs/s       4.5        Process        [PID 3306] containerd --config /var/run/docker/containerd/containerd.toml
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? by daymanstep on Friday July 04, 2025 @07:01PM (#44468653)
Which main board are you using? 5W is very impressive. I'd be surprised if it was even possible to achieve with an ATX board without some serious tuning.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? by sidewndr46 on Saturday July 05, 2025 @09:41AM (#44472742)
I'm curious to know the details of this as well. 5 watts is absurdly low for an ATX system. I've definitely seen 25 watts before. Assuming you went from a 75% efficient PSU to a 90% efficient one, that'd shave off a few more watts but it won't get you that low.

For perspective, I think the typical NIC consumes several watts of power.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? by PhilipRoman on Saturday July 05, 2025 @12:08PM (#44473671)
It's a Lenovo 310B motherboard.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? by sidewndr46 on Saturday July 05, 2025 @09:04PM (#44476878)
Wait, so we're talking about a laptop?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? by PhilipRoman on Monday July 07, 2025 @03:15AM (#44487541)
No, it's a mini PC.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi? by ndriscoll on Friday July 04, 2025 @02:04PM (#44466632)
The processors themselves all seem to be pretty efficient at idle (there's apparently no real reason to get a T processor. It just caps performance). It mostly depends on everything else. The only place I know of to get this kind of info is this thread[0] where people have been building this spreadsheet[1]. Some threads on servethehome.com also report when some pcie cards have broken power management which can destroy idle efficiency.

[0] https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste...

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18L...

[ Parent | on HN ]