29th of May

Farm status
CPU only
Off. Have been doing some Rosetta work.

Nvidia GPUs
Running Einstein and Milkyway work.

Raspberry Pi's
Running Einstein BRP4 work.

For news on the Raspberry Pis see Marks Rpi Cluster


Zen 4 news
The information about Zen 4 is sounding quite promising with motherboard makers and AMD making some announcements at Computex 2022. I will look at upgrading the Ryzen 5900X machines to the equivalent Zen 4. We're still waiting for more details from AMD about CPU specs. Interestingly AMD have said the CPU's will have integrated graphics as well as supporting PCIe 5 and DDR5 memory.

Initially there won't be anything that uses PCIe 5, apart from maybe some M.2 SSD's but that will change over time. The CPU socket has changed to AM5 so that will require a new motherboard and newer DDR5 memory. There is also talk of M.2 SSD's getting bigger, probably to the 22110 size (110mm length) to support PCIe5.


Energy pricing
We have been warned to expect electricity prices to increase up to 140% this year as the wholesale electricity prices have jumped. Energy efficiency is certainly on my mind these days. They are also expecting natural gas prices to increase although not as much. Unfortunately my home doesn't have a north facing roof so adding solar panels wouldn't help much, not to mention I have a fairly small roof area so couldn't fit many panels.