For purely sequential algorithms I agree, fewer work steps means less energy used and less time spent. But the picture is very different when it comes to paral

For purely sequential algorithms I agree, fewer work steps means less energy used and less time spent. But the picture is very different when it comes to parallel algorithms. There often is a tradeoff between doing more redundant work to reduce the latency and finish faster overall at the expense of more energy being used. One example is the "scan" operation on GPUs. There are lots of different algorithms to do it which form a gradient between fast and efficient. For reference see page 2 of this paper: https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2016-03_single-pass-parallel-prefix-scan-decoupled-look-back https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2016-03_single-pass-...