4 ms·

You could say the same about individual cars (they don't use that much energy/hydrocarbons/electricity), but in aggregate, just like cars, compute is extremely

by epgui 5y ago

You could say the same about individual cars (they don't use that much energy/hydrocarbons/electricity), but in aggregate, just like cars, compute is extremely expensive in terms of energy. Edit: note that I'm not trying to compare an individual car to an individual computer, or even aggregate cars to aggregate computers... My point was merely that aggregate compute is very energy intensive. :)

agumonkey 5y ago
90hp (an average car I believe) is 70kW, that's 1000 gaming rigs (700W) in max consumption, but I assume it would still be 1000 more under small loads. And laptops / smartphones are much lower 60/120W I think.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > And laptops / smartphones are much lower 60/120W I think. Mine were actually closer to 30W, even under load (realizing this is when I stopped caring:]). EDIT: This does seem to vary a lot by device, though; I may just happen to have owned really low-power devices.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Yeah I know that's why I quoted larger numbers for safety, some atom laptops were 15W max I believe, I remember thinkpad X using around 25W on average. Some beefy laptops might go above 150W, some use external gpus. But on average 100W seems the ballpark. And smartphones are even lower.. the energy requirement of advanced computing are ridiculously low. Apple did help a lot here: > 2021 — Anandtech found in its analysis that power consumption for the Mac mini M1 averaged 26.5 watts at the wall, assuming a multi-threaded workload. Wifi is choppy I can't dig about iphone power usage but well, it's surely below.
- epgui 5y ago
  As I tried to clarify in the edit (which preceded your comment), my point was merely that in the aggregate, compute is very energy intensive. Just for a ballpark sense of scale: > "Computers, data centers and networks consume 10% of the world’s electricity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_energy_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_energy_management
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    Yeah I understood, I just thought that even planet wide, it would require each car owner to have 1000 computers to sum to the same kind of figure. I'm also saying this because some people in the energy / climate change sector said that computing electronics were insignificant (the usual suspects being heating, transportation etc)

by epgui 5y ago

agumonkey 5y ago

90hp (an average car I believe) is 70kW, that's 1000 gaming rigs (700W) in max consumption, but I assume it would still be 1000 more under small loads. And laptops / smartphones are much lower 60/120W I think.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> And laptops / smartphones are much lower 60/120W I think. Mine were actually closer to 30W, even under load (realizing this is when I stopped caring:]). EDIT: This does seem to vary a lot by device, though; I may just happen to have owned really low-power devices.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Yeah I know that's why I quoted larger numbers for safety, some atom laptops were 15W max I believe, I remember thinkpad X using around 25W on average. Some beefy laptops might go above 150W, some use external gpus. But on average 100W seems the ballpark. And smartphones are even lower.. the energy requirement of advanced computing are ridiculously low. Apple did help a lot here: > 2021 — Anandtech found in its analysis that power consumption for the Mac mini M1 averaged 26.5 watts at the wall, assuming a multi-threaded workload. Wifi is choppy I can't dig about iphone power usage but well, it's surely below.
epgui 5y ago
As I tried to clarify in the edit (which preceded your comment), my point was merely that in the aggregate, compute is very energy intensive. Just for a ballpark sense of scale: > "Computers, data centers and networks consume 10% of the world’s electricity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_energy_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_energy_management
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Yeah I understood, I just thought that even planet wide, it would require each car owner to have 1000 computers to sum to the same kind of figure. I'm also saying this because some people in the energy / climate change sector said that computing electronics were insignificant (the usual suspects being heating, transportation etc)