How many kWh to fabricate a brand new machine better suited to the task?
As long as performance is useable (apply your own metrics!), pulling it from existing hardware is likely the option with the lower eco footprint.
Also: chances are it'll only be used for this purpose occasionally, and/or for a short while. In that scenario [fabricating new hardware] always has the bigger eco footprint.
I don’t know why you’d assume that an older system is lower footprint.
If you’ve got something consuming 100 watts average over your 24 hour period, and your electricity costs 20 cents per kWh, you’re already spending almost as much as a Claude subscription.
Just on electricity, this assumes your hardware never fails and you never incur any additional costs.
There’s a big reason why newer more efficient hardware is in demand. Something that’s 10+ years old has drastically worse performance per watt.
Obviously I am not saying to throw away your old hardware as a rule but there is a point where some of this old stuff just isn’t even worth running.
I have two LARGE Xeon systems of this era that I used to use when I was heavily involved with Kubernetes and needed to build out a home lab. One is 2x Xeon w/ 256 GB of ram, and one is 1x Xeon w/ 512GB of ram. Both are slow as dogs, and both of them take up at least 150+ watts with only one power supply. My 12th gen Intel Nuc is so, so much faster and efficient. I'm recycling the Xeon systems.
Xeon is a group of products with really varying specs. There is no indication of which XEONs. Also new consumer CPUs often have really small internal caches.
As long as performance is useable (apply your own metrics!), pulling it from existing hardware is likely the option with the lower eco footprint.
Also: chances are it'll only be used for this purpose occasionally, and/or for a short while. In that scenario [fabricating new hardware] always has the bigger eco footprint.