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> Precise estimates vary, but currently about 5 percent of all energy consumption in the U.S. goes just to running computers 30% goes on transport. > the huma

> Precise estimates vary, but currently about 5 percent of all energy consumption in the U.S. goes just to running computers 30% goes on transport. > the human brain is a computer. This particular computer uses some 10–20 percent of all the calories that a human consumes So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20. I'm not saying computers can't or shouldn't be made more efficient, but relatively speaking, the title of this article is pretty bizarre. Computers don't use very much energy compared to almost everything else in the world.

thechao 8y ago
Maybe we could also say that our civilization is energetically compute equivalent to human level intelligence when we are using 20% of our energy on computers? Alternatively, if the human brain is orders-of-magnitude more efficient than a computer (as argued in the article), then a “civilizational human-level intelligence” is, likewise, orders-of-magnitude ‘away’?
cvoss 8y ago
The article goes on to explain just how wasteful our computers are, compared to the computations that go on in cells (which is a staggeringly large amount of computation, given their speed and abundance). > But the thermodynamic efficiency of this computation—the amount of energy required by a ribosome per elementary operation—is many orders of magnitude superior to the thermodynamic efficiency of our current artificial computers. So I think the headline is justifiable in light of this comparison.
- lucideer 8y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of how inefficient computers actually are compared to cells. But I just don't really see the relevance of the comparison. Computers are so much more efficient that so many things in our world that we could much more easily improve the efficiency of: it would be great to make artificial computers as efficient as our brains but sinking resources into the effort rather than addressing much more pressing low-hanging fruit isn't really logically sound. Of course it's not a zero-sum game: we can sink resources into both, but the alarmist headline is still hyperbole for this reason.
  - visarga 8y ago
    The comparison is misguided, I agree. Those teeny 20 watts the brain is using are extracted by killing plants and animals. How about measuring the amount of death per computation? Also, let's not forget about the enormous time, space and energy used by evolution to make humans. Nothing we invented can rival that kind of resource usage. Even in Deep Learning, performant models require more data and compute. You can't obtain the same accuracy from running a computer for a day compared to 500 TPUs for a week. Humans have had lots of time to train and evolve, computers not.
    - justtopost 8y ago
      What about bacteria? Unfortunately weighing the value of life is hard. As cute as kittens, and spiders, daffidls and protozoa are, we aren't equal. And evolution did not 'make humans', and we are not the intended product of the big bang. Seems the ultimate hubris to bill the total energy expended by the universe so far to the creation of us forum posting meatbags.
      - visarga 8y ago
        There would be no forum posting meatbags if not for evolution and its enormous resource usage. While I agree that nature did not 'intend' to make humans from the beginning, we, as humans, can't just write it off. Those bacteria are an important step in our cellular apparatus, and people are comparing computers to brains (brain cells at work), here. And as long as we can't get our energy without killing other living organisms, the energy brain uses can't be compared to the energy computers use. It's physically the same, but morally not. Of course you could say computers are here because humans have killed living organisms to feed themselves, so computers partake into that, but we'd end in a loop and never reach any conclusion.
        usrusr 8y ago
        > And as long as we can't get our energy without killing other living organisms It is perfectly possible to fuel a human only from biological sources that have died a natural death. It's exactly the same as running a computer on fossil fuels, just without the millennia of waiting for sufficient accumulation that you need for building a whole industrial base in one short flash in the pan moment (compared to the millennia of accumulation). Actually, you don't even have to wait for organisms to die, you can even use fuels where the providing organisms live on, having just shed off a part they don't need anymore. No killing involved in eating an apple. And if you plant the seeds in an advantageous environment you are even taking an active role in their procreation, as the seeds that just drop into the shade of the parent tree won't thrive there.
gameswithgo 8y ago
You could probably cut that consumption in half if people stopped using interpreted languages in production, quit telling curious young programmers that early optimization is evil or that memory is an implementation detail, etc. etc. The computer is very efficient, electrical engineers toil and sweat a great deal to make them so. Then we build things with Ruby and Python and make things 2 orders of magnitude less efficient for, I think, no good reason. What makes those languages pleasant to use is not strictly tied to them being interpreted.
- ashelmire 8y ago
  > no good reason If it takes a developer hours to build something that would otherwise take days, that's a very good reason. Processing power and energy are a tiny fraction of the cost of dev time. For things where scale matters, companies switch to faster languages with more optimization. This is irrelevant for what, 95% of businesses? Granted, probably half of devs are working for big tech where it does matter, but it really doesn't for a lot of us. In any case, Javascript, which most of us are using more and more, is not that much slower than Java or other low level languages and can be used everywhere.
  - aurelwu 8y ago
    >energy [is] a tiny fraction of the cost of dev time I think that is in a lot of cases not true, just that the developer (and his company) is not paying the bill but the buyer/user. While individually this might not be a lot, therefore the individual will not complain about it either, for applications with lot of users it will add up a lot. Let's say you have a application or a device with 1 Million Concurrent users, and you could reduce the power consumption by just 1 Watt per instance, this amounts to nearly 9000 MWh yearly, which as a total cost for end users in germany would amount to more than 2,5 Million Euro (+ the climate emissions). I am quite sure that in a lot of instances you could reduce the power usage by 1 Watt and that it would cost less than even 10% of the aggregated savings. Even simple things like game menu screens having no frame limiters and putting the GPU under heavy load have been a thing in the past (e.g. Diablo3 at some point). The issue is that the developer has no incentive to improve such things, except in the most extreme cases as he doesn't benefit from it but from a macro-economic and ecological perspective it would be beneficial.
kalenx 8y ago
You clearly can't compare those two percentages. One of them is over the total energy consumption of the society and the other over the energy needed be keep a human alive. Computers would not get "magically" more efficient if another industry triples to overall energy consumption of our society, yet that is what your analysis would suggest...
imranq 8y ago
The human brain isn’t a “computer”, it’s way more complicated and can’t be described in terms of inventions it has created.
thomastjeffery 8y ago
> Computers don't use very much energy compared to almost everything else in the world. In other words: There are plenty of things in the world that use an awful lot more energy than computers. That fact doesn't make computers any more efficient.
simias 8y ago
>So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20. This comparison doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's not even comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to the concept of taste. Furthermore these percentages don't really tell you much regarding efficiency, I'm sure there are less developed societies where computers count for less than 5% of all energy consumption, doesn't mean that their computers are more efficient.
- acallan 8y ago
  Calories and can be converted to Joules. The amount of energy to run a computer (a human computer or a physical one) is interesting to me personally, as is comparing the amount of extra calories (and thus, extra emissions) it costs me to ride my bike 20 miles to work vs. driving a gasoline car.
  - fovc 8y ago
    Agriculture + metabolism has a much lower emissions per km than gas powered cars. Also, your emissions are ultimately plant based, so the only real net emissions are due to producing fertilizers and machinery for agriculture and the embedded emissions in your bike, to the extent those are oil/gas/coal based. [1] https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/how-much-co2-does-cycling-really-save https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/how-much-co2-does-cycli...
- cfallin 8y ago
  Why not, though? Energy is energy -- we (humans) oxidize food, basically burning it slowly, to power our bodies. Whether the energy is carried by glucose/ATP or electric current is just an implementation detail. Comparisons are frequently made in other domains as well -- e.g., cyclists measure power outputs in watts. The rule of thumb I've understood is that the brain runs on about 20 watts (peak power), and a human on average runs on about 100 watts. That's 8.64 MJ/day, which converts to 2064 food calories (kcal), at 4184 J/kcal.
  - peeters 8y ago
make3 8y ago
comparing these two percentages seems very esoteric. Heat dissipated by a cpu (just a function of thermodynamic inefficiency) vs fraction of electricity used by society to use computers (a function of a billion human things like economical ease of access to computers, quantity of computing needed for entertainment, availability of resources to build computers)
flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
My thoughts exactly. When reading the title I thought "They do?" My laptop consumes the equivalent of approximately a single 60w incandescent lightbulb that used to be required just to write on a pad of paper in the dark. It's capable of quite a bit more than that, however. EDIT: Updated power specifications to exact amounts.
- old-gregg 8y ago
  Your laptop consumes 200w? Maybe I'm not reading this right, but I have a modern 3.5Ghz/8-core server in the closet which runs a small army of VMs and its from-the-wall draw never exceeds 80w (about 35w on idle).
  - flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
    My laptop is far from modern. It also has to power an old screen.
    - oatmealsnap 8y ago
      200W still seems really high. A +10yo MacBook Pro used an 85W charger, and it rarely if ever reached that max. I find it hard to believe that even an old gaming laptop would require over twice that.
      - ThrowawaySR 8y ago
        Can we please stop the guesswork in this thread, comparing gaming laptops to 10 year old MacBooks, and look at the data? Just shy of that 10 years, in 2009/2010, mobile Nehalem processors were introduced, and more importantly, early 2011, mobile Sandy Bridge arrived. Sandy Bridge was super powerful. How much powerful? 2 years, 2 generations before to Sandy Bridge: Core 2 Quad Q9000 (Q1 2009) -> i7 2820QM (Q1 2011) = +100% Sandy Bridge to 6 generations later, 6.5 years later: i7 2820QM (Q1 2011) -> i7 8550U (Q3 2017) = +37% Yes, I'm mixing tick-tock cycles or low voltage with "standard versions". So let's see a more appropriate competitor: Sandy Bridge to 5 generations later, 6 years later: i7 2820QM (Q1 2011) -> i7 7820HQ (Q1 2017) = +50 % So we had processors that doubled the performance in 2 years (and more than double if we disregard not-so-common Core Quads and take often only two-core mobile processors). Yet, 6 years later, there was only a 50 % increase. Until Ryzen came recently and made Intel to quickly come with Skylake-X, i9s and FINALLY, OH FINALLY, 6 (powerful) cores in laptops, there was no real performance reasons to upgrade, only for heat or thickness, those went down, performance didn't went up so much. So, around that 2011, those were that crazy times, when you could have: 45 W or 55 W CPU (i7 2820QM or 2920XM) 55 W GPU (Quadro 2000m) two SATA drives four DIMM modules In a non-gaming, back then "standard" size laptop (ThinkPad W520). And under heavy load, anything under Tjunction (say, 95 °C) was good enough. Some laptops with only a single 55 W dissipating fan (such as the ThinkPad W520) often throttled under full CPU and GPU load and couldn't run Turbo with full GPU load, others (such as Dell Precision M6600) had two separate fans and some even came with Quadro 4000m GPU with a TDP of... 100 watts! So, back then, those laptops ordinarily came with 170+ W power supplies (even over 200 W) and just a CPU+GPU could draw well over 100 W (add the rest of the systems, hard drive here, hard drive there, all four DIMM slots populated, charging the battery) and it would easily go over the twice of that 10 year old laptop with 85 W charger. And these are workstation models. If you mention gaming laptops, those sometimes had desktop CPUs in them and required 300 W PSUs. Nowadays they also use desktop GPUs and require TWO 300 W PSUs... Please, don't base observations on 10-year old Tick (probably Penryn?) with 85 W chargers, when 7-8 years ago, a Tock (Sandy Bridge) came with literal concrete bricks as power supplies and really pulled 200 watts. Thankfully, things got dialed back after that, but at the cost of performance until now and current mobile 6-core i9s and Xeons. And to the lap comments - you really didn't want to have those laptops in your lap when they were plugged in and turbo-ing...
guelo 8y ago
I'm sure most of the computation to run society occurs in the human brains of the millions of workers.
SilasX 8y ago
Did anyone click the link? It's comparing to the theoretical limits and the potential of minimal-energy reversible computing[1]. When you talk about "computers using so much energy", the span of inefficiencies could include: A) Why so much energy per primitive operation (e.g. write bit to data store, XOR two registers)? B) Why so many primitive operations per desired computation task (sum these three numbers, find the largest of these five numbers)? C) Why so many computation tasks per unit of economic value delivered? The article is talking about A). I'm pretty sure we've improved on A) over the history of computation. I think we've gotten worse on B) per Metcalfe's law (Intel giveth and Gates taketh away). [1] Called "reversible" because thermodynamics says the only reason you need to dissipate heat/usable energy is because you perform an irreversible operation, and to avoid that you'd have to do your computations using only reversible logical operations -- where the input space has a one-to-one mapping to the output space.
deleted 8y ago
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rectangletangle 8y ago
I would be surprised if the 5% that goes toward computing didn't knock down transportation from 35% to 30% through improved logistics alone. My gut feeling is computers are a net positive energy wise. Also what percentage of that 5% goes to mining bitcoin, or re-downloading jQuery for the 5000th time?
mikeash 8y ago
It would make more sense to compare absolute numbers. A brain uses about 20W. A modern computer has similar consumption, but is many orders of magnitude less powerful.
- metalliqaz 8y ago
  That really depends on how you define "powerful". The computers are less capable in several areas, but also more capable by several orders of magnitude in other areas.
- p1esk 8y ago
  You can’t say it’s less powerful, it’s just different. It’s better at some things, worse at others, mostly because of the software.
- krylon 8y ago
  Well, evolution has spent millennia optimizing human brains, and millions of years optimizing brains in general, while we have been building computers for ~70 years, about a human lifetime. And for much of those 70 years, energy efficiency was not the top priority.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Yeah but biology never really had any choice about technology - it was always going to be cells and salts. Its really not about optimization - its about how lucky we are that real intelligence (if that's what we have) can even be achieved using cells and salts.
- kerbalspacepro 8y ago
  I'm not sure "powerful" is the word you're looking for. It's order of magnitude less _general_.
- snuxoll 8y ago
  Eh, my brain may be much more efficient at problems that involve processing complex sensory input and making split second decisions - but it’s absolute trash at doing complex, repetitive maths. Our brains are highly specialized, you’re comparing an ASIC strapped to a Z80 with modern general purpose CPU’s.
CogitoCogito 8y ago
Others have commented why your comparison doesn't really make sense, but you should respect the fact that the human brain is actually incredibly efficient if anything. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thinking-hard-calories/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thinking-hard-cal... > So a typical adult human brain runs on around 12 watts—a fifth of the power required by a standard 60 watt lightbulb. Compared with most other organs, the brain is greedy; pitted against man-made electronics, it is astoundingly efficient. IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that defeated Jeopardy! champions, depends on ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which requires around one thousand watts.
oh_sigh 8y ago
You're comparing two different energy sources - Computers use 5% of the energy we produce, whereas human computers use 10-20% of the food-energy we produce. Computers certainly use more energy than all the human brains in the world.
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
The human brain is a hell of a lot more powerful than a computer. https://bgr.com/2016/02/27/power-of-the-human-brain-vs-super-computer/ https://bgr.com/2016/02/27/power-of-the-human-brain-vs-super...
phkahler 8y ago
>> Computers don't use very much energy compared to almost everything else in the world. So highly parallel system are closing in on Teraflops per watt, which sounds amazing to me. But I really have no idea if that's high or low power.
fallingfrog 8y ago
physicist here. Stop comparing numbers that don't mean the same thing. You're making my eyebrows twitch.
8bitsrule 8y ago
For anyone heating their home/office in the winter, the energy consumed by their computer effectively has zero cost. The computing done is value added to energy-use that would otherwise dissipate through the walls and ceiling. Those of us in northern latitudes should be lucky enough to have a couple of servers in the closet helping to pay for heating.
- ced 8y ago
  Yeah, but who moves their computers outside of the closet in the summer? Then we have a larger AC bill to cover, and that's less efficient than heating.
  - rplst8 8y ago
    A/C moves heat at some energy cost. It's not 1:1 with heating.
  - Armisael16 8y ago
    AC is almost always more efficient than heating because AC systems use heat pumps.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  Only if you’re heating your house with electric resistance heat. Heating with natural gas or heat pump is more efficient (in terms of BTU per dollar) than using the waste heat from computing (which is resistance).
  - 8bitsrule 8y ago
    True, for those lucky enough to afford that option (what % of homes have HP's?). Then there's this caveat: Heat pumps are not great in cold climates. They are most effective at saving energy when in the heating mode. In a cold climate, however, your house needs more heat as the temperature outside goes down—but the heat pump works less efficiently at lower outdoor temperatures. Below a temperature known as the “balance point,” normally from between 30 and 45 degrees F., supplementary heat is required—and that means expensive electrical heating kicks in. https://www.hometips.com/buying-guides/heat-pumps.html https://www.hometips.com/buying-guides/heat-pumps.html My home town seldom reached 30 degrees from November to April.
kingaillas 8y ago
>So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20. Organic brains are also learning and doing language/image/sound processing that far exceed society's computer capabilities.

thechao 8y ago

Maybe we could also say that our civilization is energetically compute equivalent to human level intelligence when we are using 20% of our energy on computers? Alternatively, if the human brain is orders-of-magnitude more efficient than a computer (as argued in the article), then a “civilizational human-level intelligence” is, likewise, orders-of-magnitude ‘away’?

cvoss 8y ago

The article goes on to explain just how wasteful our computers are, compared to the computations that go on in cells (which is a staggeringly large amount of computation, given their speed and abundance). > But the thermodynamic efficiency of this computation—the amount of energy required by a ribosome per elementary operation—is many orders of magnitude superior to the thermodynamic efficiency of our current artificial computers. So I think the headline is justifiable in light of this comparison.

lucideer 8y ago
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of how inefficient computers actually are compared to cells. But I just don't really see the relevance of the comparison. Computers are so much more efficient that so many things in our world that we could much more easily improve the efficiency of: it would be great to make artificial computers as efficient as our brains but sinking resources into the effort rather than addressing much more pressing low-hanging fruit isn't really logically sound. Of course it's not a zero-sum game: we can sink resources into both, but the alarmist headline is still hyperbole for this reason.
- visarga 8y ago
  The comparison is misguided, I agree. Those teeny 20 watts the brain is using are extracted by killing plants and animals. How about measuring the amount of death per computation? Also, let's not forget about the enormous time, space and energy used by evolution to make humans. Nothing we invented can rival that kind of resource usage. Even in Deep Learning, performant models require more data and compute. You can't obtain the same accuracy from running a computer for a day compared to 500 TPUs for a week. Humans have had lots of time to train and evolve, computers not.
  - justtopost 8y ago
    What about bacteria? Unfortunately weighing the value of life is hard. As cute as kittens, and spiders, daffidls and protozoa are, we aren't equal. And evolution did not 'make humans', and we are not the intended product of the big bang. Seems the ultimate hubris to bill the total energy expended by the universe so far to the creation of us forum posting meatbags.
    - visarga 8y ago
      There would be no forum posting meatbags if not for evolution and its enormous resource usage. While I agree that nature did not 'intend' to make humans from the beginning, we, as humans, can't just write it off. Those bacteria are an important step in our cellular apparatus, and people are comparing computers to brains (brain cells at work), here. And as long as we can't get our energy without killing other living organisms, the energy brain uses can't be compared to the energy computers use. It's physically the same, but morally not. Of course you could say computers are here because humans have killed living organisms to feed themselves, so computers partake into that, but we'd end in a loop and never reach any conclusion.
      - usrusr 8y ago
        > And as long as we can't get our energy without killing other living organisms It is perfectly possible to fuel a human only from biological sources that have died a natural death. It's exactly the same as running a computer on fossil fuels, just without the millennia of waiting for sufficient accumulation that you need for building a whole industrial base in one short flash in the pan moment (compared to the millennia of accumulation). Actually, you don't even have to wait for organisms to die, you can even use fuels where the providing organisms live on, having just shed off a part they don't need anymore. No killing involved in eating an apple. And if you plant the seeds in an advantageous environment you are even taking an active role in their procreation, as the seeds that just drop into the shade of the parent tree won't thrive there.

gameswithgo 8y ago

You could probably cut that consumption in half if people stopped using interpreted languages in production, quit telling curious young programmers that early optimization is evil or that memory is an implementation detail, etc. etc. The computer is very efficient, electrical engineers toil and sweat a great deal to make them so. Then we build things with Ruby and Python and make things 2 orders of magnitude less efficient for, I think, no good reason. What makes those languages pleasant to use is not strictly tied to them being interpreted.

ashelmire 8y ago
> no good reason If it takes a developer hours to build something that would otherwise take days, that's a very good reason. Processing power and energy are a tiny fraction of the cost of dev time. For things where scale matters, companies switch to faster languages with more optimization. This is irrelevant for what, 95% of businesses? Granted, probably half of devs are working for big tech where it does matter, but it really doesn't for a lot of us. In any case, Javascript, which most of us are using more and more, is not that much slower than Java or other low level languages and can be used everywhere.
- aurelwu 8y ago
  >energy [is] a tiny fraction of the cost of dev time I think that is in a lot of cases not true, just that the developer (and his company) is not paying the bill but the buyer/user. While individually this might not be a lot, therefore the individual will not complain about it either, for applications with lot of users it will add up a lot. Let's say you have a application or a device with 1 Million Concurrent users, and you could reduce the power consumption by just 1 Watt per instance, this amounts to nearly 9000 MWh yearly, which as a total cost for end users in germany would amount to more than 2,5 Million Euro (+ the climate emissions). I am quite sure that in a lot of instances you could reduce the power usage by 1 Watt and that it would cost less than even 10% of the aggregated savings. Even simple things like game menu screens having no frame limiters and putting the GPU under heavy load have been a thing in the past (e.g. Diablo3 at some point). The issue is that the developer has no incentive to improve such things, except in the most extreme cases as he doesn't benefit from it but from a macro-economic and ecological perspective it would be beneficial.

kalenx 8y ago

You clearly can't compare those two percentages. One of them is over the total energy consumption of the society and the other over the energy needed be keep a human alive. Computers would not get "magically" more efficient if another industry triples to overall energy consumption of our society, yet that is what your analysis would suggest...

imranq 8y ago

The human brain isn’t a “computer”, it’s way more complicated and can’t be described in terms of inventions it has created.

thomastjeffery 8y ago

> Computers don't use very much energy compared to almost everything else in the world. In other words: There are plenty of things in the world that use an awful lot more energy than computers. That fact doesn't make computers any more efficient.

simias 8y ago

>So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20. This comparison doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's not even comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to the concept of taste. Furthermore these percentages don't really tell you much regarding efficiency, I'm sure there are less developed societies where computers count for less than 5% of all energy consumption, doesn't mean that their computers are more efficient.

acallan 8y ago
Calories and can be converted to Joules. The amount of energy to run a computer (a human computer or a physical one) is interesting to me personally, as is comparing the amount of extra calories (and thus, extra emissions) it costs me to ride my bike 20 miles to work vs. driving a gasoline car.
- fovc 8y ago
  Agriculture + metabolism has a much lower emissions per km than gas powered cars. Also, your emissions are ultimately plant based, so the only real net emissions are due to producing fertilizers and machinery for agriculture and the embedded emissions in your bike, to the extent those are oil/gas/coal based. [1] https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/how-much-co2-does-cycling-really-save https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/how-much-co2-does-cycli...
cfallin 8y ago
Why not, though? Energy is energy -- we (humans) oxidize food, basically burning it slowly, to power our bodies. Whether the energy is carried by glucose/ATP or electric current is just an implementation detail. Comparisons are frequently made in other domains as well -- e.g., cyclists measure power outputs in watts. The rule of thumb I've understood is that the brain runs on about 20 watts (peak power), and a human on average runs on about 100 watts. That's 8.64 MJ/day, which converts to 2064 food calories (kcal), at 4184 J/kcal.
- peeters 8y ago

make3 8y ago

comparing these two percentages seems very esoteric. Heat dissipated by a cpu (just a function of thermodynamic inefficiency) vs fraction of electricity used by society to use computers (a function of a billion human things like economical ease of access to computers, quantity of computing needed for entertainment, availability of resources to build computers)

flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago

My thoughts exactly. When reading the title I thought "They do?" My laptop consumes the equivalent of approximately a single 60w incandescent lightbulb that used to be required just to write on a pad of paper in the dark. It's capable of quite a bit more than that, however. EDIT: Updated power specifications to exact amounts.

old-gregg 8y ago
Your laptop consumes 200w? Maybe I'm not reading this right, but I have a modern 3.5Ghz/8-core server in the closet which runs a small army of VMs and its from-the-wall draw never exceeds 80w (about 35w on idle).
- flyGuyOnTheSly 8y ago
  My laptop is far from modern. It also has to power an old screen.
  - oatmealsnap 8y ago
    200W still seems really high. A +10yo MacBook Pro used an 85W charger, and it rarely if ever reached that max. I find it hard to believe that even an old gaming laptop would require over twice that.
    - ThrowawaySR 8y ago
      Can we please stop the guesswork in this thread, comparing gaming laptops to 10 year old MacBooks, and look at the data? Just shy of that 10 years, in 2009/2010, mobile Nehalem processors were introduced, and more importantly, early 2011, mobile Sandy Bridge arrived. Sandy Bridge was super powerful. How much powerful? 2 years, 2 generations before to Sandy Bridge: Core 2 Quad Q9000 (Q1 2009) -> i7 2820QM (Q1 2011) = +100% Sandy Bridge to 6 generations later, 6.5 years later: i7 2820QM (Q1 2011) -> i7 8550U (Q3 2017) = +37% Yes, I'm mixing tick-tock cycles or low voltage with "standard versions". So let's see a more appropriate competitor: Sandy Bridge to 5 generations later, 6 years later: i7 2820QM (Q1 2011) -> i7 7820HQ (Q1 2017) = +50 % So we had processors that doubled the performance in 2 years (and more than double if we disregard not-so-common Core Quads and take often only two-core mobile processors). Yet, 6 years later, there was only a 50 % increase. Until Ryzen came recently and made Intel to quickly come with Skylake-X, i9s and FINALLY, OH FINALLY, 6 (powerful) cores in laptops, there was no real performance reasons to upgrade, only for heat or thickness, those went down, performance didn't went up so much. So, around that 2011, those were that crazy times, when you could have: 45 W or 55 W CPU (i7 2820QM or 2920XM) 55 W GPU (Quadro 2000m) two SATA drives four DIMM modules In a non-gaming, back then "standard" size laptop (ThinkPad W520). And under heavy load, anything under Tjunction (say, 95 °C) was good enough. Some laptops with only a single 55 W dissipating fan (such as the ThinkPad W520) often throttled under full CPU and GPU load and couldn't run Turbo with full GPU load, others (such as Dell Precision M6600) had two separate fans and some even came with Quadro 4000m GPU with a TDP of... 100 watts! So, back then, those laptops ordinarily came with 170+ W power supplies (even over 200 W) and just a CPU+GPU could draw well over 100 W (add the rest of the systems, hard drive here, hard drive there, all four DIMM slots populated, charging the battery) and it would easily go over the twice of that 10 year old laptop with 85 W charger. And these are workstation models. If you mention gaming laptops, those sometimes had desktop CPUs in them and required 300 W PSUs. Nowadays they also use desktop GPUs and require TWO 300 W PSUs... Please, don't base observations on 10-year old Tick (probably Penryn?) with 85 W chargers, when 7-8 years ago, a Tock (Sandy Bridge) came with literal concrete bricks as power supplies and really pulled 200 watts. Thankfully, things got dialed back after that, but at the cost of performance until now and current mobile 6-core i9s and Xeons. And to the lap comments - you really didn't want to have those laptops in your lap when they were plugged in and turbo-ing...

guelo 8y ago

I'm sure most of the computation to run society occurs in the human brains of the millions of workers.

SilasX 8y ago

Did anyone click the link? It's comparing to the theoretical limits and the potential of minimal-energy reversible computing[1]. When you talk about "computers using so much energy", the span of inefficiencies could include: A) Why so much energy per primitive operation (e.g. write bit to data store, XOR two registers)? B) Why so many primitive operations per desired computation task (sum these three numbers, find the largest of these five numbers)? C) Why so many computation tasks per unit of economic value delivered? The article is talking about A). I'm pretty sure we've improved on A) over the history of computation. I think we've gotten worse on B) per Metcalfe's law (Intel giveth and Gates taketh away). [1] Called "reversible" because thermodynamics says the only reason you need to dissipate heat/usable energy is because you perform an irreversible operation, and to avoid that you'd have to do your computations using only reversible logical operations -- where the input space has a one-to-one mapping to the output space.

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rectangletangle 8y ago

I would be surprised if the 5% that goes toward computing didn't knock down transportation from 35% to 30% through improved logistics alone. My gut feeling is computers are a net positive energy wise. Also what percentage of that 5% goes to mining bitcoin, or re-downloading jQuery for the 5000th time?

mikeash 8y ago

It would make more sense to compare absolute numbers. A brain uses about 20W. A modern computer has similar consumption, but is many orders of magnitude less powerful.

metalliqaz 8y ago
That really depends on how you define "powerful". The computers are less capable in several areas, but also more capable by several orders of magnitude in other areas.
p1esk 8y ago
You can’t say it’s less powerful, it’s just different. It’s better at some things, worse at others, mostly because of the software.
krylon 8y ago
Well, evolution has spent millennia optimizing human brains, and millions of years optimizing brains in general, while we have been building computers for ~70 years, about a human lifetime. And for much of those 70 years, energy efficiency was not the top priority.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Yeah but biology never really had any choice about technology - it was always going to be cells and salts. Its really not about optimization - its about how lucky we are that real intelligence (if that's what we have) can even be achieved using cells and salts.
kerbalspacepro 8y ago
I'm not sure "powerful" is the word you're looking for. It's order of magnitude less _general_.
snuxoll 8y ago
Eh, my brain may be much more efficient at problems that involve processing complex sensory input and making split second decisions - but it’s absolute trash at doing complex, repetitive maths. Our brains are highly specialized, you’re comparing an ASIC strapped to a Z80 with modern general purpose CPU’s.

CogitoCogito 8y ago

Others have commented why your comparison doesn't really make sense, but you should respect the fact that the human brain is actually incredibly efficient if anything. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thinking-hard-calories/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thinking-hard-cal... > So a typical adult human brain runs on around 12 watts—a fifth of the power required by a standard 60 watt lightbulb. Compared with most other organs, the brain is greedy; pitted against man-made electronics, it is astoundingly efficient. IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that defeated Jeopardy! champions, depends on ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which requires around one thousand watts.

oh_sigh 8y ago

You're comparing two different energy sources - Computers use 5% of the energy we produce, whereas human computers use 10-20% of the food-energy we produce. Computers certainly use more energy than all the human brains in the world.

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

The human brain is a hell of a lot more powerful than a computer. https://bgr.com/2016/02/27/power-of-the-human-brain-vs-super-computer/ https://bgr.com/2016/02/27/power-of-the-human-brain-vs-super...

phkahler 8y ago

>> Computers don't use very much energy compared to almost everything else in the world. So highly parallel system are closing in on Teraflops per watt, which sounds amazing to me. But I really have no idea if that's high or low power.

fallingfrog 8y ago

physicist here. Stop comparing numbers that don't mean the same thing. You're making my eyebrows twitch.

8bitsrule 8y ago

For anyone heating their home/office in the winter, the energy consumed by their computer effectively has zero cost. The computing done is value added to energy-use that would otherwise dissipate through the walls and ceiling. Those of us in northern latitudes should be lucky enough to have a couple of servers in the closet helping to pay for heating.

ced 8y ago
Yeah, but who moves their computers outside of the closet in the summer? Then we have a larger AC bill to cover, and that's less efficient than heating.
- rplst8 8y ago
  A/C moves heat at some energy cost. It's not 1:1 with heating.
- Armisael16 8y ago
  AC is almost always more efficient than heating because AC systems use heat pumps.
sokoloff 8y ago
Only if you’re heating your house with electric resistance heat. Heating with natural gas or heat pump is more efficient (in terms of BTU per dollar) than using the waste heat from computing (which is resistance).
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  True, for those lucky enough to afford that option (what % of homes have HP's?). Then there's this caveat: Heat pumps are not great in cold climates. They are most effective at saving energy when in the heating mode. In a cold climate, however, your house needs more heat as the temperature outside goes down—but the heat pump works less efficiently at lower outdoor temperatures. Below a temperature known as the “balance point,” normally from between 30 and 45 degrees F., supplementary heat is required—and that means expensive electrical heating kicks in. https://www.hometips.com/buying-guides/heat-pumps.html https://www.hometips.com/buying-guides/heat-pumps.html My home town seldom reached 30 degrees from November to April.

kingaillas 8y ago

>So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20. Organic brains are also learning and doing language/image/sound processing that far exceed society's computer capabilities.