7 ms·
I don't think it works that way. While in general efficient programs can save energy, the "saved" MB/s do not necessarily correlate with saved J. There is no d
by bipson 4y ago
I don't think it works that way.
While in general efficient programs can save energy, the "saved" MB/s do not necessarily correlate with saved J. There is no direct cost for a instruction, there is a severe overhead from the machine plainly being switched on. And it's not like you will always be able to "use" that saved MB/s for something else.
And you entirely neglect the "cost" of optimizing. Alone the time spent looking at inefficient code probably cost more energy than all the actually saved energy by a single change.
Consider the time someone could have spent on something else, with significantly more impact.
- spacemanmatt 4y agoSo much agreed. The computing operations where saving instructions equals saving energy are really few and far between. Or non-existent.
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y agoI'm not an expert on hardware, but I do know that CPU consumption depends on CPU load. A laptop battery drains faster and fans run faster when the CPU is working than when it is idle. More MB/s mean less seconds and therefore more idle time. So how could running a program that has more instructions and takes longer to do the same work not have a cost? About the second part of your comment, it's true that optimizing has a cost, and if I were creating a "yes" or "cat" program for personal use it would obviously be pointless to optimize. But if it's a program ran by millions of people often (probably more true of "cat" than "yes"), it's not that obvious to me that millions of little savings cannot offset the time of one person optimizing.