3 ms·
I'm rather unsure of premise 5. If the program takes longer to run, but the computer would still be turned on for the same amount of time, how much does that ch
by drdeca 6y ago
I'm rather unsure of premise 5. If the program takes longer to run, but the computer would still be turned on for the same amount of time, how much does that change the amount of power used?
And, if the program finishes sooner, will some other program be run in its stead?
Now, there are benefits to code being more efficient, and computers being more energy efficient, but I don't think computation time on personal computers is a substantial contributor to household energy use, nor a relatively easy/kwh to reduce contributor to it.
And even then, I wouldn't be surprised if "getting people to power off their pcs when not using them" could have more of a contribution than "making the programs they use run faster".
That being said, striving for excellence is a virtue, and I think wanting one's code to be efficient is good on those grounds.
Philippians 4:8, NIV: "Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things."
Efficient code is more admirable and praiseworthy than inefficient code, for the most part, I think.
- tjoff 6y agoEnergy savings of being able to idle the CPU are substantial. The energy usage for ads and tracking are unimaginable.
- mark-r 6y agoI had the same idea; a computer that is done with the task you've given it will run some do-nothing idle code that doesn't take appreciably less power than the task you gave it. The article did mention a case where the difference would be noticeable though - if the program is running on a shared server like AWS, another useful program might take over once yours is done.
- Stratoscope 6y agoThat do-nothing idle code uses much less power. Computers are always ramping their power consumption up or down depending on the task they're given.
- Stratoscope 6y agoModern computers don't use a fixed amount of power. Just listen to the fans spin up to blow away heat when your laptop or desktop is running a compute-intensive program. And if it's a laptop, notice how it warms up at that time. Regarding getting people to power off their PCs, the PC itself may do a pretty good job of that on its own. It goes into a low power state whenever possible, and depending on your power management settings, may also put itself on standby after some idle time.