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Comment by pimeys | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually considering an update to my developer workstation. The 2950X with 16 cores would be in a nice price point, with 64 GB of RAM and NixOS with a modern kernel to drive that beast.

The only thing that bothers me is the energy usage. For 180W it costs quite a lot to run this, especially in Germany where electricity is not cheap.

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It only consumes 180W^w 319W at full load, when idling the whole system draws 62W

https://www.computerbase.de/2018-08/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2...

If you actually use all the threads, then the power usage is fairly efficient. You wouldn't say a 90w processor used a huge amount of energy. This is two processors on the same chip with Infinity Fabric tying them together. For what you get, I think it's pretty decent power consumption.

Yea, Germany electricity is ridiculous.

At a more reasonable 10c per kWh that’s 1.8 cents per hour and 157$ a year assuming 100% useage 24/7 vs $1799 for the CPU. Hardly going to break the bank, real world costs vs another similar CPU and you might hit 100$ worth of electricity over a 5 year lifespan.

In Germany we care about sustainable life on this planet.

And that's why I'm considering the energy usage. If it costs too much, somebody gives me a message to use less energy. For example I was able to build my NAS to use 20W of energy just because of the prices being so high.

Hopefully the investments to solar and wind will pay themselves at some point and the price of energy plummet.

It goes well beyond renewables. Even in Germany wind and solar are just not that expensive, it's a combination of subsides and failing to put aside money for decommissioning nuclear power plants.

I pay about 0.38€ per kWh and thinking of 8 hours per day usage, compiling heavy Rust and C++ projects, gaming at night. I could get my electricity prices down to 0.24€ per kWh if I'd spend some time switching providers every year.

The 1950X (16-core) is now about 760€ here in Europe, and the upcoming 2950X (16-core too) seems to go to the same or a bit lower price point. Now the price of electricity is already a much larger percentage of the purchase price, but the convenience of cutting time out from the compilation might be worth it.

Of course with so many cores, it is a good idea to get 64 GB of RAM, which adds to the energy bill. A template-heavy C++ project will eat RAM for breakfast, `make -j8` and 16 GB will definitely swap.

Spending 4x as much on electricity for well under 1/3 as long means it's still well under 200$ per year before considering what your other CPU is going to cost you.

IMO the base price is a much larger consideration as again you don't use 180W in non 100% use situations which is going to be 90+% of the time for personal coding use.

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