My use case is a homelab kubernetes cluster, so I want multiple nodes for redundancy, but I don’t want to use too much electricity or generate too much heat. But for the sake of other readers, let’s keep it general:
What’s a nice little computer for a homelab, with its own power supply, ethernet, and room for 2 internal disks?
ARM SBC or NUC with an N150 processor
Edit: oh, 2 internal disks? What kind, nvme, 2.5" ssd, or 3.5" hdd?
I’ve heard it has to be specifically an Apple ARM CPU if you’re doing this for energy efficiency. Maybe things have improved, but probably not because all the resources go to LLMs.
Regular ARM CPUs are pretty efficient. What do you mean?
They’re not the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FICjyf-e8k
Sure, but have you looked at the price/performance/watt ratio? Macs cost significantly more than x86 or ARM mini PCs and SBCs. And lots of the performance is gobbled up by MacOS itself. It’s not like it’s easy to install headless Asahi Linux and have everything working well.
If you buy a used M1/M2/M3 Mac that might be a good investment to use with Asahi Linux but Thunderbolt and other neat features won’t work.
Any board with an rk3588 or CIX chip should be fine.