SSD
Simpson Manufacturing Co., Inc.
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I've been attempting to validate with Teku on an NUC 13 i3 1315u. I had to get a new box a few months ago when I had slowdown and freezing on the last box (nuc10) which had bee used as a validator for 2-3 years with fairly good beacon score. After following the guide here (https:// gist.github.com/yorickdowne/ ff6b611a2d49855827dafdbfd2546abe) I determined it was the NUC. The SSD and ram were ok. After a long time in the entry queue, it began performing very badly. This was a surprise since the syncing & logs up to this point didn't (and still don't) indicate any trouble.
My hardware is: Asus NUC 13 i3-1315u, WD Black SN850X 4TB gen4, Corsair 2666mhz ddr4 64GB. I started with a miss rate of 15%. From the consensus and validator logs, it appeared there was no problems. No late block imports, no errors. Running chrony so the system clock should be synced. MEVboost had trouble with relays but I disabled it and got the same performance. First thing I tried was syncing nethermind on a different machine on my network and connecting the two via the JWT. I disabled the execution node on the first machine when it was finished so only teku is running on the nuc13 and nethermind is on a quadcore i7 8565u HUNSN w/Samsung 970 EVOplus 2TB, & Corsair vengeance 16gb ddr4. Performance didn't seem to improve after this. about the same.
What has helped is bumping the heap to Xmx12g and using ZGC. I enabled logging of the GC and found pauses from 1 to 4 seconds were common, sometimes 6,7 or 10 sec for major collections. ZGC has my miss rate down to 4-5%, still not great but better. The heap is 12g but I started with Xmx8g and it didn't seem to have an effect. I'm only one validator at the moment so I'm confused why the heap might have to be so large and still get lackluster performance. I'm a novice so of course I did all this with help from an LLM. The LLM I'm using is recommending more steps that I wanted to get an opinion on before I proceeded. Since the i3-1315u has 2 P-cores, it is recommending I restrict Teku to only running on those by adding CPUAffinity=0-3 to my teku service file and restrict ZGC to one thread only by adding "-XX:ConcGCThreads=1". It also wants me to restrict the NVMe to Gen3 speed bc it says my old NUC10 likely did this. (the temp right now is 29C, from smartmontools). Sorry for wall of text. Thank you for any advice.

Power efficiency is a very good point. For the last few years, RISC-V boards have been pretty bad with respect power efficiency compared to ARM boards and when looking at the computation power per watt used, they were even clearly worse than any NUC CPU. The reasons are various. One is that the RISC-V CPUs have much lower production runs than the Intel/AMD/Apple CPUs have, which means that they use older process technology, which means larger feature size which result in higher power draws for the CPUs. Another one is that the RISC-V CPUs do not have a long history of optimizing designs. Companies are happy to get a product out at all which means power efficiency is not their highest priority. Another reasons is that CPU power mode control is not very optimized on the operating system level. As far as I remember, 2 years ago some RISC-V CPUs did not even have frequency scaling on. They were running on full power no matter if you used the CPU or not. My impressions is also that sleep states for inactive cores was not really implemented for a long time. When I received this newest board, it ran pretty hot. CPU over 60°C (140°F) with the fan on full blast all the time. An update a few weeks ago massively improved on that. and it is now running at 40°C (104°F) with seldomly even hearing the fan at all. Long story short, there is progress in optimizing power usage, but RISC-V CPUs still have some way ahead of them.
Directly measuring the power usage was on the to do list, thanks to your question I just did it. The board uses 12-25 watts when running an Ethereum node. Most of the time it hovers around 13-14 watts and whenever a new block comes in it spikes for 2-3 seconds. I am running Lighthouse and Ethrex. Both are not the most efficient clients, but they are also not the worst ones. I think a large fraction of that power draw is due to the SSD. According to the specs mine can draw up to 9 watts. Not the best SSD to pair with an underpowered board, but the only one I had lying around at the time.
As a comparison a slightly more powerful ARM board that I use to run an Ethereum node (Orange Pi 5 plus with an RK3588 CPU) draws 11-13 Watts all the time. Pretty constant power draw. It runs Grandine and Nethermind. Especially Grandine is more resource efficient than Lighthouse which I run on the RISC-V board. The ARM board also has a lower power SDD which might shave off up to 2 watts compared to the RISC-V board.
Another maybe 30%-50% more powerful NUC11-i3 I use to run an Ethereum node uses 12-30 watts It mainly hovers around 13-14 watts with brief spikes up to 30 watts. The spikes are very short, so a bit hard to measure properly with my setup. Sometimes it stays at 18-20 watts for some time. The node runs Nimbus and geth, both pretty resource efficient. Also this node uses a more power efficient SSD than the RISC-V setup, this might further reduce the power draw. CPU is around 45°C (113°F), with the stock NUC11 case.
I also did all the measurements at the power plug. My ARM and RISC-V board definitely have very cheap PSUs, whereas the NUC has the official one. I would guess the cheap PSUs also tilt the measurement against the ARM and RISC-V boards.
Overall, the ARM board unsurprisingly wins, but I am honestly surprised how well the RISC-V CPU holds up. That wasn't true even just 1 year ago. The RISC-V board is not as well dialed in as the RK3588 ARM one, but it does not have to be ashamed with the comparison to the NUC11-i3. I would guess a board with an Intel Celeron processor (no idea what they are called now) instead of the i3 I used here, would be a very strong contender and might even beat out the ARM board.

About 2 years ago RISC-V hardware got powerful enough to do initial tests for running an Ethereum node on such hardware. As expected, the speed wasn't quite there yet, but we started getting some clients ready, submitted PRs, got a Devcon talk and even got some core devs interested in it. There were steady improvements in the last 2 years. We were able to run nodes for larger test networks until we managed to sync mainnet about a year ago. But only barely so. Technically it stayed in sync, but practically it was always 1-2 slots behind. This changed this summer with the newest hardware iteration. I managed to run a fully synced Ethereum node on a RISC-V single board computer (Spacemit K3 CoM260). The validator running through that node attested flawlessly and correctly attested head votes, even right after epoch boundaries. The node still is a bit slower than my usual NUCs, but that is not surprising as the board has about the power of a Raspberry Pi 5. In my impression the bottleneck still is the consensus workload. Reducing the number of individual validators helped here quite a bit. The execution client has some spare power to be able to handle gas limit increases and thanks to ePBS it should get more time per slot to do its duties anyway. So I hope my node can handle the workload for 1 or 2 more years.
Currently 2 Consensus clients run out of the box (Nimbus and Lighthouse). On the execution side, geth has always just worked. Now, Ethrex is also running, even though the initial sync is a bit more involved because the board has a 'only' 32 GB of RAM. But when Ethrex works it works perfectly and is very resource efficient. It is great to see that a second execution client now runs on RISC-V hardware. Grandine builds, but fails to run. I did not have the time yet to investigate as to why. Eth-docker also works, but does not support all client pairs just yet.
As RISC-V is an open standard, I see these CPUs to be able to capture a junk of the consumer market in the long run. It already happens with a lot of lower cost applications, where RISC-V CPUs replace more expensive ARM and other chips. There are also well funded companies building servers and consumer PCs using RISC-V CPUs There are also a some who specialize on building accelerator cards using the RISC-V standard. We will have to see if RISC-V CPUs manage to capture large parts of the market. If it it happens it will take years (~ a decade). With the direction Ethereum is taking with zk proving the network, I definitely see a possibility that smaller nodes will run on low cost hardware. RISC-V CPUs have a clear advantage here. Currently with the resource usage of an Ethereum node, combined with the RAM and SSD prices, the price advantage a RISC-V CPU can have does not really matter. I expect it will in the long run though.
For people wanting to know more about the progress, here are some reddit posts in chronological order:
First post in 2024: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1ewn8dw/daily_general_discussion_august_20_2024/lj2anr4/
Announcement of the Devcon talk we gave in Bangkok in 2024: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1gn3k7p/daily_general_discussion_november_9_2024/lw85ry2/
First person to run execution and consensus client simultaneously on RISC-V hardware (two boards) in 2025 for Ethereum mainnet. They later improved Lighthouse to support RISC-V out of the box: https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1j5uqrs/ethereum_node_on_riscv_yes_its_possible/
Summary of the progress in 2025/2026 with first node running on one board: https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/1t9tdqb/daily_general_discussion_may_11_2026/ol54wr4/

I think the strongest bull case for the two companies is actually a little different.For Micron, HBM is the obvious headline, but I wouldn't view the thesis as “HBM or nothing.”
AI servers are also using more conventional DRAM per system, and HBM itself consumes a lot of manufacturing capacity. So if HBM keeps absorbing leading-edge capacity while server DRAM demand stays strong, you can get a favorable effect on pricing and margins outside HBM too.
The part I'd watch most closely is supply discipline. Memory companies have historically destroyed good pricing by adding too much capacity. If the industry stays disciplined, Micron can benefit from both better mix and tighter DRAM supply. If everyone starts chasing the cycle with aggressive capex, that part of the thesis gets weaker.
One thing that may make this cycle different is that Micron is signing more long-term strategic supply agreements with large customers. If those actually improve demand visibility and reduce the old boom/bust behavior, that could matter almost as much as HBM itself.Sandisk is a different story.
I'd view its upside as a combination of AI driven enterprise NAND demand and a very strong flash pricing cycle, rather than AI alone.Their datacenter business has exploded, but recent results also show how much higher NAND pricing is contributing. So some of the current earnings power is definitely cyclical.
The more interesting long term piece is whether AI inference genuinely makes flash a larger part of the memory hierarchy. Things like KV cache and very large datasets make dense, lower-power enterprise SSD storage more valuable, and Sandisk is pushing high density QLC NAND specifically for that use case.
They're also signing longer term customer agreements with committed volumes and pricing structures, which looks like an attempt to make the business less exposed to traditional NAND volatility.
So if I had to simplify the two bull cases:
Micron = HBM + rising DRAM content + constrained supply + potentially better industry structure.
Sandisk = enterprise NAND mix shift + AI/inference storage growth + better NAND pricing + potentially less cyclicality through customer agreements.
The bear case for both is still very similar though: memory remains memory. If supply growth outruns demand, pricing and margins can fall much faster than the secular AI story would suggest.That's probably the variable I'd spend the most time on rather than just forecasting AI demand.