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There's going to be break even point where it's worth doing the replacement. Manufacturing a modern laptop produces around 360 kg of CO2, while energy utilisa

by simonh 4y ago

There's going to be break even point where it's worth doing the replacement. Manufacturing a modern laptop produces around 360 kg of CO2, while energy utilisation operating it for 8 hours a day for a year produces roughly 15 kg of CO2. So in CO2 terms manufacturing costs dominate massively over operating costs. Even if you run the computer for 10 years the energy consumption comes to less than half of the manufacturing footprint. That's for modern laptops though, so I suppose if a 10 year old computer uses vastly more energy its possible it's energy consumption dominates over it's manufacturing footprint in a much shorter period. https://circularcomputing.com/news/carbon-footprint-laptop/#:~:text=Through%20our%20research%20of%20230,bed%20house%20with%20CO2%20equivalent https://circularcomputing.com/news/carbon-footprint-laptop/#....

deleted 4y ago
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dredmorbius 4y ago
Largely this. The older laptop isn't likely to draw much more power. It will run far slower, however, most especially if it utilises spinning rust rather than SSD. But net draw will probably be 15--45 watts or so at load. Check your power unit rating. For many tasks ... this doesn't matter. At the shell, I rarely notice the difference between running commands on a seven-year-old Android system vs. a ... somewhat similarly-aged iMac, despite the fact that the latter is literally an order of magnitude faster. There's simply not enough load on either system to make a difference between a command completing in 0.01s vs. 0.1s, both being below my perception threshold. I do see the difference when, say, prodcessing larger JSON archives with jq, but that's really the only major differenct for direct interactive use. A heavily-loaded server is of course a different matter. As is running a full-fledged GUI desktop browser (this makes older desktop bend and break, even with only 2--3 tabs open). The other big difference is in going from classic desktop/laptop x86 architectures to low-power ARM or RISC-V, which can run on very minimal power --- most < 15 watts, some considerably less than this. Performance will vary, and many of these systems are 32 bit rather than 64 (which has major impacts on data and computational throughput), some lack maths coprocessors (which slows crypto). But again, the systems themselves are often surprisingly capable, with a verylow power budget.

by simonh 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dredmorbius 4y ago

Largely this. The older laptop isn't likely to draw much more power. It will run far slower, however, most especially if it utilises spinning rust rather than SSD. But net draw will probably be 15--45 watts or so at load. Check your power unit rating. For many tasks ... this doesn't matter. At the shell, I rarely notice the difference between running commands on a seven-year-old Android system vs. a ... somewhat similarly-aged iMac, despite the fact that the latter is literally an order of magnitude faster. There's simply not enough load on either system to make a difference between a command completing in 0.01s vs. 0.1s, both being below my perception threshold. I do see the difference when, say, prodcessing larger JSON archives with jq, but that's really the only major differenct for direct interactive use. A heavily-loaded server is of course a different matter. As is running a full-fledged GUI desktop browser (this makes older desktop bend and break, even with only 2--3 tabs open). The other big difference is in going from classic desktop/laptop x86 architectures to low-power ARM or RISC-V, which can run on very minimal power --- most < 15 watts, some considerably less than this. Performance will vary, and many of these systems are 32 bit rather than 64 (which has major impacts on data and computational throughput), some lack maths coprocessors (which slows crypto). But again, the systems themselves are often surprisingly capable, with a verylow power budget.