+++ Tuesday 24 March 2026 +++

Computing on real iron
======================

When someone mentions computing on `real iron', the term
nowadays is often used in reference to a system installed on
real hardware. The term is used to distinguish between using a
virtual machine or a container, from using real hardware.

This hasn't always been the case. In the past, the term was
used to distinguish between a system running on a main frame
and a system running on a PC. Although PC's were (and are) used
as server, at that time often the people referencing a main
frame as `real iron' considered a PC a toy system, not for
serious tasks.

Although the first PC's where very expensive, they indeed were
not very capable and soon one of the uses was gaming.

The first `servers', f.e., in a Novell network, were based on
the 80286 processor. Later followed by 80386, 80486, and
eventually Pentium, and after that by even more capable
processors.

When people started to compute on GPU's and the first GPU
clusters appeared, the PC entered the realm of supercomputing.
For many tasks GPU clusters became a valid alternative for
supercomputing systems, at a much lower price tag (and a much
lower electricity bill).

General device
--------------
The PC has evolved to a general device to be used for many
different tasks. The laptop in your backpack, the PC on your
desktop and the server where you self host your website are all
about the same. When we speak of a server, it is often more to
describe the role of the system and not so much its
capabilities. Maybe servers contain less consumer-grade
hardware like cheap SSD's, but that has more to do with
expected life time.

Of course in the data center systems are used that are not very
comparable with an ordinary PC. But in design, they are not
that different.

SoC
---
Interesting is the development of the SoC, System on Chip in
this evolution. SoC's, made for mobile communication,found
their ways to single board computers (SBCs). Again, first
expensive, until SBCs like the Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone
Black arrived. They disrupted the market with a price point of
about 25% of comparable SBSs. Again we saw the development to
more capable systems, with more powerful processors, more RAM,
faster NICs and so on.

Now, the situation has even more blurred. We see laptops and
desktop computers based on Raspberry Pi's, and recently Apple
launched a laptop based on an iPhone processor.

When you want to learn how to administer a system, like
maintaining a DNS, a webserver, or a DNS, or when you want to
learn programming, this is a great advantage. The BSD running
on your BeagleBone or Raspberry Pi, or on a repurposed router,
or on a cheap second hand PC, is just the same BSD that runs on
servers in data centers.

When you have an internet connection, you can start with self
hosting your webserver, Gopher server, XMPP server and so on,
on hardware that costs less than Euro 100 (or $100).

All thanks to that "toy system", not for serious tasks...


Last edited: $Date: 2026/03/24 15:44:12 $