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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Interesting specs for an IoT device. It looks more powerful than most current home PCs or laptops. How would you feel about hosting a small cloud or Kubernetes cluster on your coffee maker?

  up to 16 low power x86 cores at up to 2.2GHz
  fully support Intel’s VT-d hardware virtualization
  up to 64 GB of single-channel DDR4-1866 or DDR3L-1600 ECC memory
  PCIe 3.0 x16 controller (with x2, x4 and x8 bifurcation), 
  16 SATA 3.0 ports
  four 10 GbE controllers
  four USB 3.0 ports
  different TDPs starting at 8.5 W

With 4x10GbE controllers, I almost want some sort of government-mandated firewall to be built in.

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> How would you feel about hosting a small cloud or Kubernetes cluster on your coffee maker?

The thing I expect these to lead to is for everyone's router to become an implicit home server, and for that to lead to changes in the way we write "cloud" services.

Right now, a lot of background "checking up on things" for services like group chat apps, happens directly on people's phones, because they're (almost) always on and (almost) always connected to the Internet.

Now imagine that it's guaranteed that everyone in the world has an implicit personal (or family) server their phone can communicate with, and can automatically reach over and launch processes on. All the background logic would move to the server. Phone apps (and a lot of computer apps) would become simple thin-clients that talk to your home server.

It'd be like IRC bouncers, but for everything, and for everyone.

Start a multiplayer game? The lobby server launches automatically on your router.

Install a "free VoIP service" app? You've actually just installed an Asterisk server on your router; the app just configures it and acts as a softphone for it.

Want a blog? The button on WordPress.com doesn't start up a LAMP container in their cloud; it starts a LAMP container on your router.

Etc.

Nah. Home internet connections are still terrible. 2017 now and we still don't have IPv6 on residential connections (I'm on Wave and they said IPv6 deployment is still over a year away).

Home internet connections in the US are terrible. Such a shift doesn't have to start in the US (though American companies would probably be the ones making the products.)

I think IPV6 in the US is regional. I'm in the Atlanta area and I've been on IPV6 for at least two years with Comcast. This is a residential line, not a business line.

This is the result of checking my connection for IPV6 compatibility:

http://imgur.com/zUXjXWm

The extremely asymmetric nature of cable modem internet connections will make this tough when you're not at home: your house will upload responses to you at a crawl.

That, or the "home server" component will be a separate mode / augmentation for what are still primarily cloud-based services.

I'd much rather locate my personal server (or VM) in a real datacenter and behind a better SLA than my flaky Comcast.

Cable is bad (for logical reasons), but DSL services are alright. My local telco just came out with a synchronous 150Mbit plan at not-unreasonable prices. I could certainly host a few servers with that.

I think you're still right, though: the larger picture these things will slot into is as subsidiaries for what IBM has termed "cloudlets": automatic device-launched containers, operating on ISP commodity-IaaS clouds (i.e. at the "edge" in the same city the user is in, where all the CDNs and caches and mirrors they access already are.)

Cloud services would probably be written with cloudlet service-worker containers in mind, and then the home-server hardware would just be a latency-optimization, "stealing" workloads from your cloudlet to your LAN when all the traffic is just going to be over your LAN (e.g. for a home streaming service like Plex, or a game server at a LAN party) and then moving them back if you try to speak to the cloudlet from outside your LAN.

Cloudlets are the more important part of that vision, but I could see the home-server part of the design coming first, just because so many companies seem interested in putting devices into home networks that could run them (e.g. the Apple TV and its class of products; the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and other "voice boxes"; most "smart home" device hubs.)

>I could certainly host a few servers with that.

What does the ToS say, though?

Assuming you weren't being sardonic, any form of "government-mandated firewall" would be worse than useless, and doesn't even really make sense in this context.

These are fairly anemic processors so I suspect you would be disappointed trying to run a desktop OS with one. Let alone go head to head with a modern PC.

There are atom (the older silvermont core, not goldmont yet I think) laptops in the market already. They run casual desktop stuff just fine.

I'm posting from an older Thinkpad with a Core 2 Duo. Comparing this to a C2750, they appear comparable[0]. This system runs Windows 10 fine, and so I don't see why the C2750 (and C3000) would not as well. Granted, an i5 outperforms them both.

[0] http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-P8600-vs-Intel-Atom-...

random question - do those older machines support a UEFI OS install?

I'm a bit wary from a security standpoint of going back to MBR.

No, they are too old to have UEFI at all.

UEFI's security benefits are dubious anyway unless you're using your own Secure Boot keys; else, you're likely relying on Microsoft's signing key.

> This system runs Windows 10 fine

Do you have any tips on how? At work I have a brand new Dell Precision 5510 with Win10 that I had to upgrade to 32 GB RAM when using two full-HD external monitors (internal 4K display off) running Firefox and Autodesk Inventor, because on 16GB it would randomly crap out and bluescreen (with the new useless "sad smiley" type BSOD). Mind you, FF and Inventor were only using ~6GB RAM total.

Er... I can't help you for I have never used a computer with more than 4 GB. And I was running dual monitors in the days when 256MB was a very decent setup. You had to upgrade to 32 GB RAM?

I guess I should distinguish between when I had bluescreens, and when Win10 crashed the display manager saying "your system is low on memory". And only when running on dual monitors, never on the internal 4K display (which oddly enough has more total pixels). The "out of memory" errors led me to upgrade to 32 GB.

That really sounds like a hardware problem.

Do you have the Samsung NVMe driver installed? I had a similar issue on a fresh Windows 10 install that was solved by installing the driver directly from Samsung (the one for the 950 Pro works if I remember correctly).

I'll try that, thanks.

Bluescreen == unrecoverable kernel corruption == either bad drivers or failing hardware. If replacing the RAM fixed it, your old RAM was dead. Nothing to do with the capacity

I've seen it once even after upgrading, so it's not that the old RAM was dead. I'm guessing BIOS or driver issues as others have mentioned.

Make sure your drivers (and BIOS) are completely updated.. when I went to a GTX 1080 for a 4k display, I had a lot of weird issues... they all went away with a BIOS update of all things. Have to say, being able to trigger a BIOS update from a windows software was a weird experience... more scary when you come from having to create a dos boot disk with everything needed to update something.

Will try BIOS upgrade, thanks.

"older" doesn't even begin to describe it, mind you. These are ten years old. A six year old Sandy Bridge (T420, X220 that series of ThinkPads) is going to wipe the floor with these Atom CPUs.

Depends on the application.

In single thread performance the ancient core 2 is going to destroy the Atom, even at the same clock rate. The only thing good in the atom is the large core count [1] which makes up for the anemic single core performance, which is nice for small servers but pointless for desktops.

[1] from a performance point of view of course. It probably consumes significantly less.

With a SSD, I would think they would be acceptable for light tasks.

I've got a 4 core now running ESX and it works fine for the most part, having a 16 core would be interesting to step up to to have more things running.

Does Atom support virtualization ?!

Can you share which cpu/memory/esx r u running ?!

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