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32cores for 800$, feasible for a nice home server rig



Or (as https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thinkmassive pointed out) wait for SOPine ClusterBoard https://pine64.com/product/clusterboard-with-7-sopine-comput... and get 28 cores for $310. ($100 board, $30 per A64 compute module once it comes out, seven modules on a board.)


but really, in what way would 32 cores become useful in a home server, except running a bunch of VMs that do nothing or donate money in terms of electricity to folding@home


When doing my home programming projects, I regularly max out my 16-core / 32-thread Threadripper for minutes, or even hours. If you're not taking minutes to hours per programming task, you aren't really pushing the limits of modern computers. High-performance GPU and/or CPU is great.

Things like "what's the best 32-bit number for my custom random number generator" ?? (Try all 4-billion+ 32-bit numbers and run statistics on them, then sort the results). Except not really, that kind of search takes less than 10 seconds now, lol. But that should give you an idea of the size / scale of modern CPU power.

Or searching for chess or other AI search tasks. Or deep learning. Or raytracing. Or LTSpice simulations. Or... you get the gist.


Beefy CPU, couple TB of HDDs and an SSD to boot off of: (comfortably) host your own private cloud. And probably a <whatever social/messaging solution you prefer> instance for your friends & family too if you're feeling adventurous. Via authenticated Tor Hidden Services, for optimum easy-safe ratio.

Now the value of a private cloud is a subjective question, true, but personal experience suggests having it right there on home lan encourages practical use, especially in a shared flat.


all of that could be trivially done on a raspberry pi for $30 instead of a massively overspeced ARM server for $10000


I agree, that's what I'm rocking: a bunch of 8gig pi's doing everything from RAM, and a threadripper DB server. All at home, all for <3k out front. Equivalent monthly bill at a major hoster would be >200/month more than electricity + the cost of <low single digit> hours needed.

The same setup with a more reasonably priced consumer proc (but no ECC) would be around 1.5k out front.


It would chew through large compiles (e.g., kernel, BSD userspace, anything Gentoo) in no time flat. Especially if you load the thing up with RAM to use as a tmpfs...


Since it is ARM, running them at 0% would use little electricity :)


I assume because of leakage current the basic power usage at low-load isn't all that different for the same amount of chip real estate




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