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Hardware has gotten more power hungry over the years not less. As long as people are more expensive than energy/hardware, I don't see this changing anytime soon

Hardware has gotten more power hungry over the years not less. As long as people are more expensive than energy/hardware, I don't see this changing anytime soon. Maybe we'll get better at utilizing our high performance hardware by offloading the computations more and more to the cloud but overall energy usage will likely keep going up. Growing economies and cheap, abundant energy go hand in hand.

majewsky 5y ago
> Hardware has gotten more power hungry over the years not less. Hardware has massively improved in the power/watt and computation/joule categories. The increased power consumption is because of rebound effect. If we really only used cellphones for telephone calls and SMS, we could build them to last for months on a single charge. Yet we have to charge them every day because they are built to do not just telephony, but also maps, reservations, banking, 3D games, and so on and so forth.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  I'm aware of the efficiency gains, it doesn't change what I said though. Power consumption for computing won't go down anytime soon in my opinion.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > Yet we have to charge them every day because they are built to do not just telephony, but also maps, reservations, banking, 3D games, and so on and so forth. While I agree with you here, I feel like people don't try to optimize an already working base. For example, I recently updated the clock app on my android phone. There is no difference in functionality in the new app, but it has the android 12 design. This time could have been spent optimizing the app in a way or another. I do the same thing on my phone as I did 5/6 years ago: read a lot online, sometimes listen to music, sometimes look at maps, sometimes use apps, telephony. My battery lasts longer these days, but not as much because my phone also has to show sweet animations and be able to run high-performance stuff (I made the error of buying a flagship phone).

majewsky 5y ago

> Hardware has gotten more power hungry over the years not less. Hardware has massively improved in the power/watt and computation/joule categories. The increased power consumption is because of rebound effect. If we really only used cellphones for telephone calls and SMS, we could build them to last for months on a single charge. Yet we have to charge them every day because they are built to do not just telephony, but also maps, reservations, banking, 3D games, and so on and so forth.

cinntaile 5y ago
I'm aware of the efficiency gains, it doesn't change what I said though. Power consumption for computing won't go down anytime soon in my opinion.
Zababa 5y ago
> Yet we have to charge them every day because they are built to do not just telephony, but also maps, reservations, banking, 3D games, and so on and so forth. While I agree with you here, I feel like people don't try to optimize an already working base. For example, I recently updated the clock app on my android phone. There is no difference in functionality in the new app, but it has the android 12 design. This time could have been spent optimizing the app in a way or another. I do the same thing on my phone as I did 5/6 years ago: read a lot online, sometimes listen to music, sometimes look at maps, sometimes use apps, telephony. My battery lasts longer these days, but not as much because my phone also has to show sweet animations and be able to run high-performance stuff (I made the error of buying a flagship phone).