I thought the same until I calculated that newer hardware consumes a few times less energy and for something running 24x7 that adds up quite a bit (I live in Europe, energy is quite expensive).

So my homelab equipment is just 5 years old and it will get replaced in 2-3 years with something even more power efficient.

Where in Europe?

Asking coz I just did a quick comparison and it seems to depend but for comparison I have a really old AMD Athlon "e" processor (like literally September 2009 is when it came out according to some quick Google search, tho I probably bought it a few months later than that but still ...) that runs at ~45W TDP. In idle conditions, it typically consumes around 10 to 15 watts (internet wisdom, not kill-a-watt-wisdom).

Some napkin math says it would cost me about 40 years worth of amortization to replace this at my current power rates for this system. So why would I replace it? And even with some EU countries' power rates we seem to be at 5-10 years amortization upon replacement. I've been running this motherboard, CPU + RAM combo for ~15 years now it seems, replacing only the hard drives every ~3 years. And the tower it's in is about 25 years old.

Oh I forgot, I think I had to buy two new CR2032 batteries during those years (CMOS battery).

Now granted, this processor can basically do "nothing" in comparison to a current system I might buy. But I also don't need more for what it does.

Well if you have a system that does "nothing" it's hard to argue to replace it

"Nothing" from parent was a comparison. Doesn't mean their system is idle.

However many systems are mostly idle. A file server often doesn't use much cpu. It often isn't even serving anything.

That is definitely true and why I compared idle watts. That Athlon uses the same idle watts as modern mobile CPUs. So no reason to replace during the mostly idle times. Spot on. I can't have this system off during idle time as it wouldn't come up to fulfill its purpose fast enough when needed and it would be a pain to trigger that anyway (I mean, really, port knocking to start up that system type thing). Else I would. That I do do with the HTPC which has a more modern Intel core i3.

The "nothing" here was exactly meant more for the times when it does have to do something. But even then at 45W TDP, as long as it's able to do what it needs to, then the newer CPUs have no real edge. What they gain in performance due to multi core they loose in being essentially equivalent single core performance for what that machine does: HTPC file serving, email server etc.

I guess you did the math but wouldn't it be more effective to spend the money on solar panels instead of replacing the computer hardware?

I have panels and the night is long. Batteries are still very expensive.

Energy is very cheap for data centers. have you ever looked up wholesale energy rates? It’s like a cent per kilowatt hour.

"Just fine". Presumably you're not super-concerned with the energy costs? People who run data centres pretty much _have_ to be.

Sample size of 1 though. It's like how I've had hard disks last a decade, but a 100 node Hadoop cluster had 3 die per week after a few years.

Spinning rust and fans are the outliers when it comes to longevity in compute hardware. I’ve had to replace a disk or two in my rack at home, but at the end of the day the CPUs, RAM, NICs, etc. all continue to tick along just fine.

When it comes to enterprise deployments, the lifecycle always revolves around price/performance. Why pay for old gear that sucks up power and runs 30% slower than the new hotness, after all!

But, here we are, hitting limits of transistor density. There’s a reason I still can’t get 13th or 14th gen poweredge boxes for the price I paid for my 12th gen ones years ago.

More than that. The equipment is depreciated on a 5 year schedule on the company balance sheet. It actually costs nothing to discard it.

There’s no marginal tax impact of discarding it or not after 5 years - if it was still net useful to keep it powered, they would keep it. Depreciation doesn’t demand you dispose of or sell the item to see the tax benefit.

"Depreciation doesn’t demand you dispose of or sell the item to see the tax benefit."

It does require to dispose the item if you are a government entity otherwise the budget for the new item isn't allocated.

No but it tips the scales. If the new hardware is a little more efficient, but perhaps not so much so that you would necessarily replace it, the ability to appreciate the new stuff, but not the old stuff might tip your decision

There are several significant differences between your garage server and a data center.