I'm currently doing the following to save power on my pi:
Disable HDMI:
sudo tvservice --off
Disable Wifi
echo "dtoverlay=disable-wifi" | sudo tee -a /boot/config.txt
Disable Bluetooth and bluetooth services
sudo systemctl disable hciuart
echo "dtoverlay=disable-bt" | sudo tee -a /boot/config.txt
Turn off Power LED:
echo 0 | sudo tee /sys/class/leds/led1/brightness
Have you done any power testing with Ethernet vs Wifi?

I usually blacklist the WiFi and Bluetooth. Not to save power. I have 20 Pi's and I would rather they not use WiFi at all, there wouldn't be much bandwidth left for the other devices. Most of them are Pi3's so are running Einstein work.

cd /etc/modprobe.d
sudo nano raspi-blacklist.conf and add the following
# wifi
blacklist brcmfmac
blacklist brcmutil
# bluetooth
blacklist btbcm

Not sure if they are still correct, I got this from forum posts on raspberrypi.org some years ago. I also remove the pi-bluetooth package.

What is the difference between blacklisting and disabling like in the quoted text?

What is the difference between blacklisting and disabling like in the quoted text?

As far as I know they both do the same thing,

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MarksRpiCluster

Has anyone tried the new Raspberry Pi OS (64 bit) yet?

I upgraded my Pi's a couple of days ago and they got about 30 updates and the kernel version went up. They appear to be running the same as before. I haven't specifically tried doing a "full-upgrade" as they suggest or a clean install of the 64 bit version, which they are saying is a beta version.

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MarksRpiCluster

Has anyone tried the new Raspberry Pi OS (64 bit) yet?

I upgraded my Pi's a couple of days ago and they got about 30 updates and the kernel version went up. They appear to be running the same as before. I haven't specifically tried doing a "full-upgrade" as they suggest or a clean install of the 64 bit version, which they are saying is a beta version.

I haven’t tried it yet - I’ll be building a clean 64bit install when my first 8GB pi arrives on Wednesday. I’ve heard the Linux kernel 5 has specific improvements for the new Broadcom chip in the pi 4 , but I’m not sure if it will have an impact on Rosetta.

I’m looking at building a kubernetes cluster out of my Pis just to work out the process, but once I do that my results will no longer be comparable.

I ended up going with the standard 32bit Raspbian light for the install on my first 8GB pi 4. I figured that would give the best possible comparison to the 4GB pi 4. Oddly enough it benchmarked slightly slower than a 4GB pi4 at the same clockspeed, but I don't know what the margin of error is on the boinc benchmark test so it may not matter.

The new host is here: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/show_host_detail.php?hostid=4525006

do share the peak memory consumption that you observe, you can try running rpi-monitor which would capture that.
i'm thinking of getting a piece or two but my local distributor don't have stock yet
it seemed with 4GB and running 3 threads, i don't seem to see 'waiting for memory' situations frequently any more, but of course with 8GB it is more comfortable running all 4 threads
i noted credits earned seem lower with the more recent wu, various from robetta as they are prefixed with rb i'm not sure why

do share the peak memory consumption that you observe, you can try running rpi-monitor which would capture that.
i'm thinking of getting a piece or two but my local distributor don't have stock yet
it seemed with 4GB and running 3 threads, i don't seem to see 'waiting for memory' situations frequently any more, but of course with 8GB it is more comfortable running all 4 threads
i noted credits earned seem lower with the more recent wu, various from robetta as they are prefixed with rb i'm not sure why

The initial set of jobs this pi started included a pair that used 1.5gb each, and 2 at 480mb each. Just under 4gb total would work on a 4gb pi 4, but these jobs tend to increase in size over time, so I may have already had a job set that could use the extra memory.

thanks i think i'd get a 8gb one when it becomes available at my local retailer. 1.5GB tends to be seen for the 'larger' wu, but i've at other times seen about 30% of memory used on a 4GB Pi4 with all 3 threads running. Perhaps it is because the wu just started running and like you've mentioned, they tend to increase in size over time. 8 GB would also means one can do away with all that zram stuff, there really isn't a point 'wasting' cpu cycles compressing and uncompressing memory. takes more power returns less points. swap and zram only make sense if it is used to keep 'unused' stuff.

thanks i think i'd get a 8gb one when it becomes available at my local retailer. 1.5GB tends to be seen for the 'larger' wu, but i've at other times seen about 30% of memory used on a 4GB Pi4 with all 3 threads running. Perhaps it is because the wu just started running and like you've mentioned, they tend to increase in size over time. 8 GB would also means one can do away with all that zram stuff, there really isn't a point 'wasting' cpu cycles compressing and uncompressing memory. takes more power returns less points. swap and zram only make sense if it is used to keep 'unused' stuff.

Agreed - With the 8gb pi there is no reason to have zram. However, the way zram works there is minimal impact to have it enabled and unused - a unused zram partition uses like 32kb of ram. If you don’t need to swap it stays at that low level and doesn’t need to compress anything.

Just playing around a little bit with undervolting all 4 of my pi 4s run at stock speed 1500mhz at -1 voltage. 3 of them seem to run fine at Stock speed at -2 voltage, and one seems to work at -3. At the moment I don’t know if it will be long term stable, or if there was a measurable drop in watts, but it seems to have knocked 4-5 c off the temp.

update on the under volting. It seems to be that there is a minimum voltage set at -2 (going lower has no effect). That minimum is 0.8350V.

I've had success with over_voltage -2 AND arm_freq 1565 - that is about a 4% clockspeed increase while also being under volted. It may actually be very hard to beat this combination of speed and power.

Anyone else able to try to see if they can hit 1565mhz on over_volt=-2?

Got my first Pi4 8GB and installed it yesterday. Its here.

I went with the Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit which was a lot easier than having to get Raspbian into 64 bit mode. I simply installed it. Added buster-backports repo, no need for signing keys. and off it went. I also dug out the aarch64 Einstein BRP4 app and ran that. It was quicker than running the Einstein armhf app.

When I get the time I will change my Pi4 4GB from Raspbian with the 64 bit hacks to Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit.

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MarksRpiCluster

my Pi4 4gb broke above 50,000 points. Others probably did better as i intermittently stops between blocks of run. i'd probably try out the 64 bit os at some point.
are there visible point differences between running on 64 bit os vs the 'old' 32 bit Raspbian?
i'd guess it should be 'the same' since r@h bundle all its own libraries

my Pi4 4gb broke above 50,000 points. Others probably did better as i intermittently stops between blocks of run. i'd probably try out the 64 bit os at some point.
are there visible point differences between running on 64 bit os vs the 'old' 32 bit Raspbian?
i'd guess it should be 'the same' since r@h bundle all its own libraries

Performance wise it seems to be the same, although the optimised Einstein app was about 4 times faster than the stock one.

Setup is a lot simpler, simply image the SD card with the Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit and boot up like normal. Run raspi-config to change the password and host name, etc and that’s the OS. Install BOINC, attach to the project and you’re done. No need for a cc_config file any more.

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MarksRpiCluster

I picked up a pi 4 2GB, and have been running some tests with it with just a small heatsink and a low airflow usb fan blowing on it (no case).

The heatsink I used is an old Zalman ZM-RHS1 - its a super small VGA heatsink from like 10+ years ago. I have probably 30 of them on hand, as I bought them on clearance at something like $1 per box of 8 and only used a couple over the years.

Observations:

1) While in theory the 2GB model should use less power than the 4 GB model, my UPS shows the same 3-4W usage at 100% load. When set to over_voltage=-2, and with USB, HDMI, wifi, etc turned off, it reads a consistant 3W power usage, just like a 4GB model.

2) when turned on its edge (GPIO connector down, USB-C connector up), with the small heatsink and a fan blowing on it, it runs fine even over clocked at 2000 mhz and over volt 4 (max temp seen so far is 69C, and no throttling). I imagine that a more reasonably large heatsink designed for the pi4 would drop the temp in this scenario multiple degrees.

3) with a zram configuration for 100% (effective 4GB of ram), you can run 4 Rosetta processes most of the time. I suspect you could stretch it to 150% (effective 5GB ram) and you would almost always be running 4 Rosetta processes. That said, I think the ideal setup is to split the 2GB model between 2 Rosetta processes and 2 Open Pandemic processes.