3 ms·

The "cloud" can be far more energy efficient than personal computing devices, and geographically distributed computation has costs as well, if you're doing comp

by elihu 5y ago

The "cloud" can be far more energy efficient than personal computing devices, and geographically distributed computation has costs as well, if you're doing computation that requires a lot of data that isn't all in one place. I think keeping one's own data on one's own local hardware has other significant privacy/security/control benefits, but energy efficiency is probably not among them.

Const-me 5y ago
More than 50% personal devices are phones and tablets. They are using ARM CPUs notable for power efficiency (because battery powered). More than 50% of computers being sold are laptops. Guess what, these mobile CPUs are notable for power efficiency, because battery powered. Only a minority of users (myself included) have desktop computers with FLOPS/watt figure that’s worse than massively multicore server-targeted AMD64 processors used by cloud providers. Clouds are slowly transitioning to ARM64 as well (I have personally shipped a cloud app working on Ampere Altra CPUs) but still, so far majority of them are using faster but less efficient AMD64 CPUs. Another thing, moving data costs energy. Inside each CPU core, you have like 400GB/sec bandwidth to the caches with no energy overhead. Moving data to/from system RAM takes way more electricity. Moving that data to/from a server on another end of the world takes way more electricity than that: the wires and optical cables are long, and there’re many routers/amplifiers/other hardware in between. And another thing. Personal devices have limited compute power. This creates incentive for developers to optimize their code. If your stuff is too slow, users with low-end devices will be unhappy. With unlimited compute power of the clouds, it sometimes makes sense to neglect that and just throw resources at the problem.

3 ms·

The "cloud" can be far more energy efficient than personal computing devices, and geographically distributed computation has costs as well, if you're doing comp

by elihu 5y ago

Const-me 5y ago
More than 50% personal devices are phones and tablets. They are using ARM CPUs notable for power efficiency (because battery powered). More than 50% of computers being sold are laptops. Guess what, these mobile CPUs are notable for power efficiency, because battery powered. Only a minority of users (myself included) have desktop computers with FLOPS/watt figure that’s worse than massively multicore server-targeted AMD64 processors used by cloud providers. Clouds are slowly transitioning to ARM64 as well (I have personally shipped a cloud app working on Ampere Altra CPUs) but still, so far majority of them are using faster but less efficient AMD64 CPUs. Another thing, moving data costs energy. Inside each CPU core, you have like 400GB/sec bandwidth to the caches with no energy overhead. Moving data to/from system RAM takes way more electricity. Moving that data to/from a server on another end of the world takes way more electricity than that: the wires and optical cables are long, and there’re many routers/amplifiers/other hardware in between. And another thing. Personal devices have limited compute power. This creates incentive for developers to optimize their code. If your stuff is too slow, users with low-end devices will be unhappy. With unlimited compute power of the clouds, it sometimes makes sense to neglect that and just throw resources at the problem.