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Lowering power consumption on Opteron (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I have a Proxmox server running two Opteron 6272 CPUs on an Asus KGPE-D16 (chosen because it was the fastest computer that supported Libreboot, although I haven't gotten around to installing it). Using normal BIOS settings, it's drawing just under 100W at idle, measured via smart plug reported in Home Assistant. With aggressive efficiency settings (PowerCap to P-state 4 and disabling CPU 2 entirely) it idles at 70W. It's a server, not a gaming PC, so it doesn't appear to have any options for underclocking or adjusting voltage.

Anybody know of any other ways (maybe software-based) to get the power draw down further?

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Tangential question: What kind of server apps require that kind of processing power? I run a server on an Intel N200 laptop with multiple apps and services and it rarely uses more than 12% CPU and 15 watts. I'm wondering if I'm going to eventually run into something that needs a more powerful platform.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That N200 is likely on par or faster than dual Opteron 6272 CPUs, since they are so old.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    A single Opteron 6272 is somewhat faster than the N200, but the Opteron's TDP is 115 watts while the N200's is only 6 watts. OP's server with 2 processors is more than 2x as fast as my single processor laptop, but can require nearly 40x the electricity. For a home server it's major overkill.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Nothin' I'm running, that's for sure!

    It's not really that there are services that require that much processing power for a single request; it's that it's designed to handle normal requests for hundreds or thousands of users at once.

    I suppose that supporting 0.5TB of RAM means it could deal with quite a big LLM, but any sort of halfway-modern GPU would absolutely run circles around it in terms of tokens per second, on any model that fit in their VRAM.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Sounds like my laptop will be plenty fast for some time to come.

    This platform doesn't use much power to begin with, but I do run TLP using a battery profile despite the fact it's always plugged in. My intent is to lower the power consumption a bit further and extend battery run time if the AC fails. There's no noticeable impact on application performance. If you're running Linux maybe it will work on your hardware.

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