The major takeaways of this work are:
(1) For specific workloads, clusters of repurposed phones are cheaper and more carbon efficient than traditional servers.
(2) More broadly, scavenging unwanted equipment shows excellent potential for building economic and carbon-efficient systems, especially when renewable energy is plentiful.
(3) Sustainability has operational and manufacturing facets; manufacturing dominates as operating trends towards zero with cleaner energy mixes.
(4) Accurate LCA information is essential for carbon-based analyses; it would be beneficial if more ICT manufacturers published this information, including cloud providers who build custom systems. Our work highlights the need for more holistic analyses of the environmental impact of computing. With the substantial carbon cost of manufacturing and the difficulties of responsible recycling, the energy efficiency of a device may be the least significant component of its environmental and human impact.
I piggyback this question: Also, can they be used without screens? I’ve got a couple I’ve found on the side of the road smashed up, but if I had to guess, the logic boards might be intact and maybe usable…
If the person that lost them unlocked the bootloader, didn’t use a lock screen password and enabled USB adb debugging on any connection hacking it to work without the confirmation on screen then it would work. Extremely unlikely that would be the case
Meh, depends on which device I’m using. Not looking to use my devices in such a way, unless they break, but I have a phone and a tablet that meet all those qualifications.
Granted, not very common, but they do exist.