August 18, 2025
From 2025, we’ve gradually shifted from Intel-based servers to modern ARM-powered ones. Intel’s performance and support are great, but our environment necessitated a reevaluation of our tools and efficiency.
To accept the status quo, or the will to seek better?
From the beginning of the year 2025, we have gradually moved from using Intel-based servers to modern ARM-powered servers. While Intel has provided good results and is generally well-understood and has great support, our environment values forced us to think about what tools we use and how efficiently are we using them.
We expected to see a drop of 25-30% in energy consumption, and another 10% drop in energy costs induced by the server cooling technology. After a four-month monitoring period, we’re happy to announce that we’ve met and exceeded our expectations in both direct and cooling energy costs. What earlier meant using over 3 MWh of energy per year, has come down to 0.85 MWh energy consumption per year. This is a drop of almost 72% in energy consumption.
Meaningful impact
The transition from a traditional Intel infrastructure to a modern ARM infrastructure also meant we needed to re-engineer some components to be more efficient, and it also meant deprecating some methods that were no longer necessary for modern operations. We also offloaded our content delivery fully to a third-party CDN, which allowed us to seek options that do not need excessive data transmission capabilities. None of our transition was noticed by our customers, except for a few 5-second gaps between songs on a few Sunday mornings at 3AM (which probably no one noticed).
Because the data centers our services reside in use 100% renewable energy, there’s less CO2 emissions to offset. This would also mean the drop in CO2 is less impressive than what it would be if we used non-renewable energy.
By switching to modern platforms, we’ve cut our CO2-equivalent emissions by what is equivalent to either driving a petrol car for almost 700 kilometers, or burning 213 liters of gasoline annually. It’s also almost exactly the same amount what nine mature trees absorb annually.
Collins Group is a broadcasting technology company that removes technical headaches from radio operations. Our autonomous systems take over the roles that used to require dedicated technical staff, freeing stations to operate like media companies instead of engineering departments.
Read more about our climate work from the link below.
