Posted by indigodaddy 9/2/2025
If you're buying ultra-power, you're forgoing power-efficiency.
Low cost and power efficiency are pretty much the same thing for a datacenter though, since cooling is the most expensive part. Hence e.g. AWS pushing Graviton.
And I don't know if that statement is accurate, since passive cooling would be even better than active cooling from an efficiency perspective and particularly if you also consider reliability. Less moving parts would mean higher reliability unless, eg., the thermal paste evaporated on the cpu.
A single phone, far away from other sources of heat, used only in environments that are comfortable for humans (which may well involve active cooling at the building level), and configured to throttle down when it's used for more than a few minutes, perhaps not (although even then, I've seen phones get uncomfortably hot when gaming, and had my own phone shut down because it's too hot on occasion). If you were setting up banks of phones to run in a datacenter environment, and expecting to run them flat out, you'd probably want to actively cool them.
> And I don't know if that statement is accurate, since passive cooling would be even better than active cooling from an efficiency perspective and particularly if you also consider reliability. Less moving parts would mean higher reliability unless, eg., the thermal paste evaporated on the cpu.
Everything is tradeoffs. Per recent posts here, the likes of AWS are now at the point of cooling CPUs directly with datacenter-scale watercooling; essentially the building's air conditioners, rather than terminating at a fan unit on the inside, feed cooling water directly to a plate mounted onto the CPU heatsink.
My first idea, to mitigate risk of fire, it’s possible to locate some hand made sand bag above the phone, so in case there’s fire, the sand would neutralise it. Also, I’d try to emulate charge-discharge cycles by enabling and disabling smart socket. I wonder if that’s possible to automate using the phone itself. E.g. when it reaches 20% it enables smart charger, and disables it upon reaching 80%. So it can do it in perpetuity. Since the screen would be off all the time, I guess one charging cycle would be once a few days. Which is twice or thrice better than average user who charges their phone once or even twice a day. So, theoretically, a Pixel with a new battery might survive a few years, if not 5 years, off one battery. Then a user might replace the battery. So, theoretically, rubbing it a server is entirely possible, I guess. Otherwise, super cool. I’d love to try this myself now. I guess that may be a perfect solar-powered server. For it, maybe one doesn’t want a smart charger. Just let the sun charge the thing whenever there’s a sunny day.
https://mitanshu7.github.io/html/SSH_into_Android_with_Termu...
I don't think it would suddenly be hosted on something else in the very few days since.
Edited to add: I don't think it's hosted via a phone with a SIM, it would appear that the device is connected to their home network.
Also: Haha, ooops, 2024 (not 2025!)
Even outdated smartphone like samsung S9-S10 or Iphone X is way overpower than your average SBC(Pi4, Pi5), yet we mostly can't do anything because OEMs decided to make our life harder to recycle them.