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A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

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Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#131

Post by llsf »

Around 2015, I was working for a company that processed coupons for large retail stores. We had lots of performance issues, mostly due to our centralized database at the time.

I was dreaming at the time to ship a mobile phone at every large store (e.g. Target) to process the data in-situ. It could hold its own database (partitioned for the tenant), it would have its own UPS (battery), and have enough CPU power to serve the POS requests of one store, even the largest ones.

A mobile phone would be our on-prem server.

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#132

Post by [deleted] »

zipy124 wrote: post #3

This is ignoring the fact that the main reason retired phones are e-waste is proprietary firmware blobs and locked-down systems preventing users from maintaining their phone with security updates, and very limited support length from OEM's leads to VERY insecure devices after they drop out of support. You should not be connecting these old devices to an internet accessible network. Google notably does well here with…

[deleted]

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#133

Post by noisy_boy »

It is ridiculous that I can pick up pretty much any average computer, install Linux on it and be on my way in an hour or so but have to go through so many hoops to do the same on Android and even then the results are mixed. We have been really shafted by the phone makers by the brainwashing that they are somehow extra special things. They are just computers with a radio in it. It is shameful.

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#134

Post by seba_dos1 »

m1333 wrote: post #112
seba_dos1 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years? I have a bunch of phones from 2009 around that are still fully working and I have never had eMMC fail on any of them, and they use it for swap among other things. In my experience screens, batteries and USB ports fail much more often.

Phone from 2009 uses SLC, or MLC with large SLC cache, thus capable of at least 10k FDW (full disk writes). Modern phones typically use TLC or QLC within a inch of their physical limits (signal to noise ratio), thus qualified typically only up to 500 FDW, which translates into several years of use. There are other mechanisms at play which further degrade this number, such as WAF (write amplification) and others

Just checked the datasheet of the eMMC 5.1 used in my 2020 phone that I use daily now and it's MLC. It also has optional pseudo-SLC mode.

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#136

Post by saagarjha »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #128
RetroTechie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you'd have to replace the OS with an up-to-date one to use the phone as a cluster node. But... if Google can do so if handed a random pile of old phones, then why would a consumer not be given the same option for their phones? If it works only for phones sold by Google once, same question holds. And applies to other vendors. As you said: the "phone becomes useless just because OEM drops support" cycle needs…

Replacing the OS is only one part of the equation, it doesn't mean you're replacing the low-level firmware blobs provided by various chipset vendors (like Qualcomm). For phones before the Project Treble era (~2018), the OS, the kernel, and the vendor blobs were all deeply intertwined with each other. Because you can't get newer blobs from the hardware vendors, it's generally not possible to run a newer OS on those de…

Firmware blobs for…what? It doesn’t matter if the camera or fingerprint sensor is working if you’ve harvested the motherboard.

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#137

Post by d3Xt3r »

saagarjha wrote: post #136
d3Xt3r wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing the OS is only one part of the equation, it doesn't mean you're replacing the low-level firmware blobs provided by various chipset vendors (like Qualcomm). For phones before the Project Treble era (~2018), the OS, the kernel, and the vendor blobs were all deeply intertwined with each other. Because you can't get newer blobs from the hardware vendors, it's generally not possible to run a newer OS on those de…

Firmware blobs for…what? It doesn’t matter if the camera or fingerprint sensor is working if you’ve harvested the motherboard.

Please re-read my comment, I already gave specific examples.

Re: A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones

#140

Post by jrmg »

Aachen wrote: post #116
jrmg wrote: post #69

It’s counter intuitive to me that this is a net carbon win. - Are these phone processors really as compute-pet-watt efficient as a regular data center processor? - There’s so little embodied carbon in a phone motherboard - and presumably some embodied carbon in whatever custom racking hardware up is being used to house these. Is that really compute-power-per-embodied-carbon-footprint efficient than making a new serve…

I don't have time for an elaborate sourced answer but in short, yes, the efficiency gains of modern devices is almost negligible compared to the CO2e of producing a new device at current device lifespans. I can't remember if you would have to use a device for 15 or 25 years before upgrading is better than continuing to use it, but I thought it was 25 Edit: yes, 25. Found my go-to reference for this quickly after all…

The carbon cost to produce or use a new phone isn’t relevant here.

The important question is whether repurposing an already-existing phone to act as a server (including physically adapting the phone and producing whatever extra hardware is required to do that) is less carbon-costly than producing and using a new designed-for-the-purpose server.

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