Thankfully we did not have any frozen pipes. Our water main enters our crawl space underground and seemed to do OK - I’m not quite sure how deep the line is going out to the street. My next door neighbor wasn’t quite so lucky - her water main shutoff is above-ground under an insulated box on the side of her house and the PVC pipe ended up bursting. I’m not sure why that design was used….

So I now have 4+ days of testing data from the i7-12700T. This processor has 8 performance cores which are dual-thread and 4 efficiency cores that are single-thread for a total of 20 threads. The “T” series chips from Intel are the lower power ones - this chip has a base frequency of 1.4 GHz but can turbo up to 4.7 GHz briefly as needed. The system this chip is in is a small desktop running Windows 11. At idle, the system draws ~8-9W which is pretty impressive. Under full load, it has been drawing 53W and the clock speed hovers right around 1.9 GHz. It has been returning ~118-120 MCM work units per day and producing ~82,000 points per day. Using 1.272 kWh per day, the points per kWh works out to 64,465. Quite the efficiency champ and almost matches the Apple M1 chip I tested a couple of years ago in efficiency while producing almost double the raw compute performance of that chip.

Speaking of energy and efficiency related topics, I’ll also give a super quick update on my solar array. With two full calendar years in the books since it was installed at the end of 2020, it has been going strong, producing ~9,150 kWh of electricity in 2021 and ~9,070 kWh in 2022. My other two recent energy related projects were installing a heat pump (variable speed, inverter driven) to replace one of my two HVAC systems in October of 2021 and a heat pump water heater in July of 2022. I’ve been super happy with both and put together a little table of the impact those changes have made - they have cut my CO2 emissions from ~13,000 pounds (5,897 kg) per year down to ~2,000 pounds (907 kb) per year. The cherry on top is that they also reduced my total energy spend down to ~$700 for the year. I calculated what I would have paid using energy prices from the past year and my electricity + gas probably would have been about $2,000. I also did a little calculation comparing heat pumps to gas furnaces using the electricity and gas prices currently in effect where I am ($0.103/kWh and $1.57/therm of fossil gas, both before tax) and per unit of actual delivered heat, heat pumps come out ahead here. I think the pricing in parts of MN is a bit different - the last time I looked for St. Cloud at least, Xcel was charging more (~$0.14/kWh) for electricity and less (~$1.00/therm) for gas, so the economics aren’t quite as great there at the moment. My parents in St. Cloud just got their first heat pump this year though (a hybrid system), so will be curious to compare stats of our systems in the years ahead.

Link to a picture of the table of data regarding solar/heat pumps: https://imgur.com/a/ivOEgvq

Wish WCG would support apples’s M1 processors. Would like to see how well my mini M1 crunches. That 7-12700T seems to be a good efficient cruncher. Is that Win 11 the arm version?

You are correct Sgt. Joe - one can absolutely use Apple Silicon processors with WCG - I'm running both an M1 and M1 Pro right now with zero problems. BOINC released an Apple Silicon compatible client right away back in 2020 and it has worked great since then for CPU compute jobs. The GPUs on Apple Silicon chips are not supported for OPNG but CPU tasks have run great for the past two years and the Apple Silicon chips are super efficient from a power perspective. There's no reason Bearcat couldn't fire up their Mac mini M1 if they wanted to - the M1 Mac mini I have in use has returned ~50 valid MCM work units in the last 24 hours and produces in the ballpark of 40,000 WCG PPD while only consuming 0.6 kWh per day.

Yeah, I've really been pleased with it thus far. The Intel Core i7-12700T is a regular x86-64 processor, so the Windows 11 version is the regular version and not the ARM compatible "Insider Preview" version of Windows 11. Unrelated to WCG, I am going to be trying out the ARM version of Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac via VMware Fusion 13 as VMware just added support for the ARM beta of Win11 in their latest release of Fusion.

The BOINC Manager software is a Universal app (current recommended version is 7.20.4 from https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download_all.php ), so it has native code for both Intel and Apple Silicon (ARM) based Macs in a single installer and installs the appropriate version based on the processor architecture of the Mac it is being installed on. Whether the work units themselves from various BOINC projects were written for an ARM-based processor or x86-64 processor is dependent on the various projects, but with Rosetta enabled, that generally doesn't matter too much right now and should be pretty much invisible to how CPU work units run.

Bearcat:
I ran into a little tidbit of information today. It turns out the team name for Baruch College in Manhattan is "The Bearcats."
I didn't know you were that famous they named a team after you.
Cheers