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Linux on their 486 class machines.

The P4 era was the worst definitely. I've tended to put more and more on Rasoberry Pi SBCs recently, which use maybe 1W, obviously that isn't always possible if a lot of storage is involved.

I took a gamble a few years back and went with a 35W TDP i5 on a solid-cap board with 2.5" HDDs, it's served me well with idle consumption of about 20W and runs lots of VMs nicely. Power is expensive in the U.K., but it's just about paid for itself compared to the AMD Opteron system it replaced I think.
 
There were other 'casualties' of this power race. For example, I used to work at a company that developed its own embedded devices. One of these used an AMD Geode and ran a custom x86 linux distribution with our software on top of it, connecting to the sensors in the device etc.
Some years ago, AMD stopped making the Geode. The only embedded x86 alternative that was left, was the Intel Atom series. Now, surely, these had much better performance-per-watt, and more performance in the absolute sense. However, you couldn't get them in the same power envelope as the Geodes. I don't recall the exact numbers, but let's say the Geode operated in about a 4-5W range, where the Atom was around 14W, something like that.
The problem was: our cases were designed for just 4-5W, and with the Geode, no special cooling was required. No fans, no special heatsinks or anything.
The Atoms however would overheat in this case, so the only way to make them work was to drill holes in the case and put in a fan. Also, these devices were installed on vessels and trucks and such, so when installing them, people would have to make sure there was enough airflow.
 
I remember these Geodes, X support for them has been removed ca. 2011, with removing "nsc" driver. They needed only a small heatsink and had a computational power comparable to Pentium 133MHz. Well, for me it was perfect for controlling a machine and was much cheaper than RPi, but it's needed to install Debian 5 on it to make X display a preview window.
Fortunately it has no connectivity.
 
I've got several slim clients scattered about, doing various unattended things. All use Via processors (Esther, mostly, but one or two Nehemiah-equipped boxes. Low-power, can run Linux or Win98 just fine. Instead of the original DOMs, I'm using CF cards. Fan-less, with integrated PSU and real serial and parallel ports, as well as networking, and USB what's not to like?
 
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