Hello,
i own different devices running on different platforms. So decided to compare there boinc performance using the same project. The chosen project was yoyo@home, because it does has work available for Android, Linux, Linux on Arm and Windows. The downside is that work packages take a long time to finish. To (hopefully) reach a stable RAC all devices were running 17 days for 27 hours a day. The electricity consumption was measured with the same devices and when the consumption was fluctuating 1 watt up/down i used the higher value. The consumption is including the power supply. For Laptops the screen was off and the wlan on. None of the laptops has an AMD or Nvidia graphic card.
The compared machines are:
- A Raspberry 3 with active cooling running rasbian.
- A Laptop with a core i7 3632QM running @ 2.0Ghz on 4 cores and Win7 (Refurbished - category B).
- A Pentium J4205 (Asrock Board) running @ 2.4 Ghz on Ubuntu 16.04.
- A Nexus 7 Android tablet with USB cable soldered to the battery charging electronics (battery died long time ago) with a fan blowing on the tablet to prevent the CPU from throttling.
- An Odroid XU 4 running @ 1Ghz for all 8 cores to avoid throttling and system freezes. Its running the Hard Kernel Linux and has an customized passive cooling .
- 2 Laptops with estimated yoyo@home performace. Those devices run Word Community Grid (WCG) and i compared the performance against an i7 3632QM laptop running WCG. The estimated is that yoyo@home scales similar to WCG. The laptops have an Intel U7300 @1.3 Ghz or an Core 2 Duo T8300 @1.6Ghz.
Further i included the investment for the different devices. For the Nexus 7, i7 and U7300 laptop those are prices from Ebay for used devices. For the Odroid and Raspberry the prices are what i paid for a complete running system. You may be able to build a few things slightly cheaper, in particular when you can use old parts. I did not find a Core 2 Duo T8300 laptop for sale.
All investigations are collected in the following table:
It can be seen that the old laptops are no good choice in terms of performance per watt of per €. The most efficient is the Odroid running @1 Ghz while the i7 laptop offers the most performance per invested €. The Nexus 7 and the Rasberry are similarly efficient. However, if you want to run the Nexus 7 24/7 you have to remove the remove battery and do some soldering.The Pentium J4205 is a good choice for a passive system when you have have an spare disk and power supply. This could reduce the investment to about 120€, which would make it the best choice. My favorite is the i7 laptop - since it is a complete system with disk, power supply, battery and screen. This makes the system install and monitoring rather easy. Further laptops can survive short power outtakes.
I found i really interesting that there is no device in the list which is significant more efficient than the others. Unfortunately i have no last generation smart phone which i can run 24/7 to add to the statistic. If somebody can provide some numbers i would be really interested to extend the table.
best
Lars
Edit: as reported below by "sodom" a RAC of 700 can be reached with the Raspberry 3. This would give 120 points per watt or 12 points per €.
You mastered time dilation in the process of BOINCing!
In all seriousness, thank for this quality post. We need more people to experiment with hardware and project results like this :)
Well,... ... just this morning the Raspberry reached a RAC of 520. This does not change the numbers significant. I will let it run and maybe update the table if necessary.
I'm running Raspberry Pi 3's with a RAC of 700 at yoyo@home.
Okey, good to know. It seem that should have waited even longer with the Raspberry. This would move the performance in the region of 120 Points per watt.
I think it depends a lot more to the applications of yoyo you are our crunching e.g. the perfect cuboid app needs more than one day to crunch and got more than 400 Points. The runtime of an OGR WU was similiar but I got less than half of the points of the perfect cuboid WU.
Continue with this good work. Started following and Up-voted.
hi lars, nice article !
I have a few months back started to dig into running boinc on android devices, articles are there somewhere... sorry to late to find them :) but they are under my user somewhere :)
Keed up the good work !
LG
Jan
Hi Jan, i tried to find you article but i was not successful. If you find it can you please post a link?
Hi Lars, here you are :)
https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@jedigeiss/update-boincing-on-android-devices
Thank you. Unfortunatly it is not possible to integrate your data into my comparison since you used a different project. I think i would need to get hold of some other devices to expand the table.
I can test some other devices.
The refurbished laptop with the core i7 how much does something like that cost and did you buy it on ebay ?
As stated in the table i paid 260€. I bought a Fujitsu Celsius Mobile H720 from Harlander (www.harlander.com) in Germany. It came with a 1 year limited warranty.
Thanks for the information.
odroid still my favorite
Congratulations @lars-eisenbart! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on any badge to view your own Board of Honor on SteemitBoard.
For more information about SteemitBoard, click here
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP