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Comment by rcthompson | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't this their April fools joke not too many years ago?

2009, apparently. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_April_Jokes#...

There was a small backlash about this a couple of years back when someone suggested dropping i686 support in the forums.

Apparently no one even noticed this time.

In 2009 the Core 2 family (Intel's first real 64-bit consumer processors) was just under 3 years old, it's over a decade since then and even low-end Atom's are full 64-bit chips now - there's little reason to continue to support 32-bit systems considering their age (and anybody running them should really upgrade, these older systems are terribly inefficient both in general performance as well as power draw).

anecdotally, people are regularly throwing away/throwing in the recycling perfectly good core 2 duo desktops from the 2008-2009 era with 4GB of RAM, video cards with DVI interface that will drive a 1920x1200 monitor, etc. Anything older than that from the P4 generation has likely gone to the recycler long ago.

A Core 2 Duo desktop is not what I would consider "perfectly good" anymore, for the exact same reason I threw my PowerEdge 1950 in the trash - these older chips will use more power to get the same job done, DDR2's significantly higher voltage than DDR3 plays a huge role here as well. They may perform acceptably, but you're paying more in the long run via your power bill.

The target audience of a refurb Core 2 desktop has no overlap with the camp that will have their PC on enough to even bring power efficiency into consideration. The hundreds saved reusing an otherwise-waste computer would take decades of rising power bills to make back during which even the new system would probably die well before you broke even.

Even just going from a system with a Core 2 Duo E8400 to something more recent like an i5-2400 can result in 50W savings or slightly more at idle. This can be a big difference in areas with high energy rates (PG&E is something like $0.25/KWh) when you consider not only idle power draw, but also general improvements to performance and power efficiency making the CPU take less power when under everyday load and also returning to idle faster. You could easily save $30 or more a year, especially considering most people could get away with the iGPU and use even less power driving a PCIe graphics card.

There's plenty of people offloading sandy bridge or newer systems at this point and they're dirt cheap, being that I live in Boise, ID the power savings of desktop components aren't terribly important to ME - but I realize I live in a little bubble when it comes to cheap electric rates.

>There's plenty of people offloading sandy bridge or newer systems at this point and they're dirt cheap

I recently picked up a couple Ivy Bridge Core-i3 Dell Optiplex desktops for under $100 each to replace some older machines at work. Totally worth it, and they came with Win 7 Pro, which can still be upgraded for free to Win 10 Pro. I'd imagine by this time next year Haswell desktops will have fallen to the same price.

This is the only April first post I could find: https://www.archlinux.org/news/the-canterbury-project/

Which isn't related

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