13 ms·

All these power hungry beasts coming out of Intel and NVIDIA feel quite out of sync with the zeitgeist in a world that's worried about the power bill - especial

by m12k 4y ago

All these power hungry beasts coming out of Intel and NVIDIA feel quite out of sync with the zeitgeist in a world that's worried about the power bill - especially when the M1/M2 is there to provide contrast. I'm getting Pentium 4 vs Core architecture vibes.

nimbius 4y ago
arguably it was the same thirst for electricity that was the killing stroke for most of the POWER architecture. that, and IBM contract fees.
omegalulw 4y ago
I would say that people who regularly invest in top end hardware don't care as much about power bills. Otherwise power efficient chips is the norm (laptops, phones, etc).
- giobox 4y ago
  This is slowly changing IMO - I'm seeing concern over energy use even on forums discussing high end hardware builds as cost of energy mounts in Europe. Previously no one really ever mentioned this other than to laugh at poor thermals. If some of Nvidia's next generation 4xxx series GPUs are close to 1000w draw as many rumors suggest, the total draw of a high spec Intel/Nvidia system is going to probably have similar running costs to an electric space heater when playing demanding games. The existing 3090ti is already a 500w part, which not so long ago was enough to power a whole system in addition to the GPU.
  - 2fast4you 4y ago
    And probably the heat output of a space heater as well. I had to move my tower into another room because it kept the whole room way too hot
    - xen2xen1 4y ago
      The pilot light on my furnace went out years ago. I only noticed because when I opened the door to the room with my computer a light but noticeable heat blast hit me. It took a second, but I turned around and checked my furnace, etc instead of going in the room. It really was a revelation about how much heat those things produce.
  - nightski 4y ago
    The power cost of running my enthusiast build is on the order of a few dollars a month. Now I am all for being green but there are things in my household that are much more of a concern than this. Huge datacenters full of these chips is one thing. A personal computer for hacking & gaming probably not such a big deal.
    - barrkel 4y ago
      24h x 30 days x .5kW x 0.25 CHF/kWh gives me 90 CHF a month to run my PC, assuming it never sleeps. Have you run the calculation? It's worthwhile configuring suspend for PCs these days. My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.
      - maccard 4y ago
        And double that number if you're in the UK.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - nightski 4y ago
        I use suspend on my PC and I definitely do not run it 24h, or anywhere close to that. Also power is $0.08/kWh where I live.
        gambiting 4y ago
        That's insanely cheap power, use it while you can. I'm paying £0.40/kWh, so about 46 cents per kWh.
        brewdad 4y ago
        Really? My power is some of the cheapest in the country and we pay ~13 cents/kWh. It's a little misleading though since my bill breaks out generation and distribution costs into separate line items. They are both billed per kWH though and add up to 13 cents.
  - chris11 4y ago
    It's worse than that. Gamer's Nexus had a video a few months ago about power transients becoming a bigger problem. Power spikes can double the amount of power needed. It doesn't really impact average power useage, but it can cause a psu's ocp to shut down the machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnRyyCsuHFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnRyyCsuHFQ
  - gambiting 4y ago
    Yeah exactly this. I have a 3080 with a 5900X, would consider myself an enthusiast, and after recent price hike to my tariff here in the UK electricity usage is definitely something that's on my mind. Like, it hasn't stopped me gaming yet, but I'm very acutely aware that I'm using £1 worth of electricity every few hours of play - it adds up.
    - bufferoverflow 4y ago
      > £1 worth of electricity every few hours of play I hope you make a lot more per hour of work. Stop worrying about that.
      - epolanski 4y ago
        Whether he does or not it's none of your business, and it doesn't change the fact that those are high prices and sources of environmental issues. This power draw is getting out of hand on desktop, consoles and x86 laptops and is largely a symptom of lack of competition and lack of technological advances.
        lmm 4y ago
        > those are high prices By any reasonable measure they're not. £1 for "a few hours" of fun is a very cheap hobby.
      - gambiting 4y ago
        I mean, thank you for the thoughtful advice about my finances, but it doesn't help in the slightest. Life is getting a LOT more expensive lately, with everything going up in price - I'm seeing my grocery bills double, energy bills triple, spending lots more money on petrol, on eating out, on taking my family out for trips, and yes - on gaming too. Is that £1 every few hours making me destitute? No, absolutely not and I'm extremely privileged to be able to afford it. But at the same time every £1 taken for this isn't a pound saved, or spent on my kid, or on literally anything other more productive. So yes, I can "easily" afford it, but it doesn't mean that the energy consumption of my gaming rig hasn't affected how I think about it. Any future hardware upgrades will also be impacted by this - there is no way I'm buying a GPU with 500W TDP, even if again, I can afford the energy bills.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    > If some of Nvidia's next generation 4xxx series GPUs are close to 1000w draw as many rumors suggest Those rumors are for millisecond long transient spikes, not an average of anything. So basically the rumor is a 500w peak load. Just like how the current 350-400w GPUs have transient spikes to upwards of 800w. It's not a problem in terms of power consumption (although obviously the increase from 400w to 500w would be), rather it's an issue with over-current protection in power supplies tripping. It's a "need bigger capacitors" type problem.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  > don't care as much about power bills Not yet!
- musicale 4y ago
  > that people who regularly invest in top end hardware don't care as much about power bills It adds up, especially in data centers where you end up needing even more megawatts of power and cooling capacity.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> All these power hungry beasts coming out of Intel and NVIDIA feel quite out of sync with the zeitgeist in a world that's worried about the power bill - These CPUs aren't consuming 250W all the time. Those are peak numbers. Both Intel and AMD are providing huge efficiency gains, too. Rumors show the new i7 13700T Raptor Lake part can have a 35W mobile TDP and still outperform a Ryzen 7 5800X: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13700t-raptor-lake-allegedly-faster-than-5800x-35w https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13700t-raptor-lake-a... Speed scales nonlinearly with power. These high TDP parts are halo parts meant for enthusiast builds where it doesn't matter that the machine draws a lot of power for an hour or two of gaming. It's also trivially easy to turn down the maximum power limit in the BIOS if that's what someone wants. The power consumption isn't a fixed feature of the CPU. It's a performance/power tradeoff that can be adjusted at use time.
- jorvi 4y ago
  Its still pretty terrible from an optimal performance viewpoint. I can undervolt my 3070Ti by ~100mV, dropping performance by ~6% but dropping temperature by about 10C, or 13%, and dropping fan speed from PS3 to inaudible for anything <90% load.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  > for an hour or two of gaming U gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers.
- TakeBlaster16 4y ago
  Just adding to what you said, a 24-core CPU won't get anywhere near peak power usage during gaming. Most games only use a handful of cores. The only way you'll approach it is with parallelizable productivity work like video encoding or compiling code.
  - ForOldHack 4y ago
    My nephew, B, got his 16+8 i9, during Path of Exile, to peak at 250W, and use all 24 cores. He is running at 5.2Ghz, and using air cooled. We are not sure at all how it uses e-(efficiency) cores, when it has 16 p-cores w/ hyper threading, but it all did show up in the new dark mode task manager.
crisdux 4y ago
If you consider the mainstream products of Intel and Nvidia, they have way more moderate power consumption. These products with massive power draw are ultra enthusiast products. They are an outlier. You could build a great PC now with a RTX 3060 and a mainstream CPU that would be fine with a 500~ watt PSU. As technologists, we should support manufacturers pushing the limit in power and performance. It helps drive overall efficiency and move technology forward.
- coconut08 4y ago
  where is the amd/nvidia/intel product that offers comparable performance at a power draw that is anywhere near m1?
  - crisdux 4y ago
    I believe AMD Ryzen 6000 mobile cpus can hold their own against the apple m1. They have comparable performance and can be set by the manufacturer at a TDP comparable to the m1(and still perform well). Except for mainly m1 optimized apps, GPU performance should be pretty comparable too. Ryzen integrated graphics perform better in gaming.
- epolanski 4y ago
  Power consumption doubled at least even on mainstream and keep increasing gen over gen. 1070 vs 3070 is +52٪ average (145 vs 220w) and +66% (154 vs 250w) sustained. 2070 vs 3070 is +10% (195) or +24% (203) sustained. Even the 3060 you defend draws power as older flagships and 500w arent enough even for mainstream gaming. And it keeps getting worse both on gpu and cpu size. We aren't technologists but consumers, and reality is that x86 and gpus are in near duopolys so the 3 companies involved have little reasons to do a better job and it's clear Apple socs or more and more cloud moving into arm have not been enough of wake up calls.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    And yet energy efficiency continues to improve: https://tpucdn.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-ti-founders-edition/images/energy-efficiency.png https://tpucdn.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-ti-founder... In fact, the 3070 is significantly more power efficient than the 1070 is. Because while yes power is up 50%, performance is up 100%. So performance per watt has continued to improve even as power consumption has also increased. The reality of power consumption is that it's the main lever to pull right now to deliver generational gains. It's the same lever Apple pulled for the M2 even. > more and more cloud moving into arm have not been enough of wake up calls. You mean the ARM enterprise SoCs that use just as much power as x86 does to deliver on average worse performance?
babypuncher 4y ago
In Intel's case, they need to push these insane TDPs in order to even dream of performance parity with AMD and Apple. All those years spinning their wheels on 14nm+++++++++++ are biting them in the ass.
neals 4y ago
I don't know, we found Helium-3 on the moon this week, so I think it might be fine.
agumonkey 4y ago
netburst was the first thing that came to mind
xani_ 4y ago
They are in development for years, not last 6 months
bee_rider 4y ago
I wonder what % of the overall power bill a PC actually consumes. My gut would say it doesn't compare, really, to the water heater or air conditioner, but it would be good to see numbers.
- Arrath 4y ago
  I would love some PSU metering ability, to see actual data about how much juice my PC is pulling down. Other than getting a kill a watt meter, how could one go about this?
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    Knockoff meters are like $10 on Amazon. Not a bad investment.
    - iggldiggl 4y ago
      I have what is probably a close spiritual cousin of one of those, and while it even touts a power factor display, it also loves to show ridiculously high values during idle consumption for anything involving some sort of power electronics (not just for my computer, but for example for my washing machine, too – it shows sensible values while the heating element runs, or when the motor actually turns, but in-between it shows nonsensically high values). It is a few years old, though, so maybe by now quality standards have improved even for those kinds of cheapo-meters…
  - paulmd 4y ago
    They make "digital PSUs" like the Corsair AXi series that can talk to your PC over a comm port.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Some UPSes can show how much power is being drawn by everything connected to it, in this case presumably your computer. You probably want a UPS anyway if you've got a power guzzling (and thus presumably expensive) machine.
  - 4y ago
justapassenger 4y ago
Power consumption is an issue, but worrying about CPUs of a gaming machine is like worrying about straws in the context of the pollution. Electricity needs of an average household in western world are going to increase a lot in coming decades, with transition to more electric heating, cooking, cars, etc. Gaming machine power usage is minuscule compared to those.
- jbkkd 4y ago
  The major difference between a CPU and, say, an oven, is that the former runs 24/7, whereas an the latter would run for a short period of time. Back of the envelope calculation here: Assuming an average oven consumes 2kWh, and a CPU 0.1kWh: Oven for four hours (average weekly usage) would be 2 * 4 = 8kWh weekly. CPU for 24 hours, 7 days a week = 0.1 * 24 * 7 = 16.8kWh weekly.
  - Dinjector 4y ago
    The flaws in your calculations are apparent when we realize that modern CPUs clock down when they are not busy. You would assume this would be common knowledge on a site called Hacker News.
  - gspr 4y ago
    Interesting choice of units, kWh per hour?
- epolanski 4y ago
  Just because energy needs keep increasing it's not a good reason to be okay they do. While most house electronics keep pushing to consume less, computers go in the opposite direction. This also adds tons of heat in my laptops or the air. Working or gaming in a small room during hot days is painful. Even consoles making noises of a turbo jet are nowadays considered normal. It's a disaster.

by m12k 4y ago

nimbius 4y ago

arguably it was the same thirst for electricity that was the killing stroke for most of the POWER architecture. that, and IBM contract fees.

omegalulw 4y ago

I would say that people who regularly invest in top end hardware don't care as much about power bills. Otherwise power efficient chips is the norm (laptops, phones, etc).

giobox 4y ago
This is slowly changing IMO - I'm seeing concern over energy use even on forums discussing high end hardware builds as cost of energy mounts in Europe. Previously no one really ever mentioned this other than to laugh at poor thermals. If some of Nvidia's next generation 4xxx series GPUs are close to 1000w draw as many rumors suggest, the total draw of a high spec Intel/Nvidia system is going to probably have similar running costs to an electric space heater when playing demanding games. The existing 3090ti is already a 500w part, which not so long ago was enough to power a whole system in addition to the GPU.
- 2fast4you 4y ago
  And probably the heat output of a space heater as well. I had to move my tower into another room because it kept the whole room way too hot
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    The pilot light on my furnace went out years ago. I only noticed because when I opened the door to the room with my computer a light but noticeable heat blast hit me. It took a second, but I turned around and checked my furnace, etc instead of going in the room. It really was a revelation about how much heat those things produce.
- nightski 4y ago
  The power cost of running my enthusiast build is on the order of a few dollars a month. Now I am all for being green but there are things in my household that are much more of a concern than this. Huge datacenters full of these chips is one thing. A personal computer for hacking & gaming probably not such a big deal.
  - barrkel 4y ago
    24h x 30 days x .5kW x 0.25 CHF/kWh gives me 90 CHF a month to run my PC, assuming it never sleeps. Have you run the calculation? It's worthwhile configuring suspend for PCs these days. My 3090 never seems to go below 120W, for one thing.
    - maccard 4y ago
      And double that number if you're in the UK.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - nightski 4y ago
      I use suspend on my PC and I definitely do not run it 24h, or anywhere close to that. Also power is $0.08/kWh where I live.
      - gambiting 4y ago
        That's insanely cheap power, use it while you can. I'm paying £0.40/kWh, so about 46 cents per kWh.
      - brewdad 4y ago
        Really? My power is some of the cheapest in the country and we pay ~13 cents/kWh. It's a little misleading though since my bill breaks out generation and distribution costs into separate line items. They are both billed per kWH though and add up to 13 cents.
- chris11 4y ago
  It's worse than that. Gamer's Nexus had a video a few months ago about power transients becoming a bigger problem. Power spikes can double the amount of power needed. It doesn't really impact average power useage, but it can cause a psu's ocp to shut down the machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnRyyCsuHFQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnRyyCsuHFQ
- gambiting 4y ago
  Yeah exactly this. I have a 3080 with a 5900X, would consider myself an enthusiast, and after recent price hike to my tariff here in the UK electricity usage is definitely something that's on my mind. Like, it hasn't stopped me gaming yet, but I'm very acutely aware that I'm using £1 worth of electricity every few hours of play - it adds up.
  - bufferoverflow 4y ago
    > £1 worth of electricity every few hours of play I hope you make a lot more per hour of work. Stop worrying about that.
    - epolanski 4y ago
      Whether he does or not it's none of your business, and it doesn't change the fact that those are high prices and sources of environmental issues. This power draw is getting out of hand on desktop, consoles and x86 laptops and is largely a symptom of lack of competition and lack of technological advances.
      - lmm 4y ago
        > those are high prices By any reasonable measure they're not. £1 for "a few hours" of fun is a very cheap hobby.
    - gambiting 4y ago
      I mean, thank you for the thoughtful advice about my finances, but it doesn't help in the slightest. Life is getting a LOT more expensive lately, with everything going up in price - I'm seeing my grocery bills double, energy bills triple, spending lots more money on petrol, on eating out, on taking my family out for trips, and yes - on gaming too. Is that £1 every few hours making me destitute? No, absolutely not and I'm extremely privileged to be able to afford it. But at the same time every £1 taken for this isn't a pound saved, or spent on my kid, or on literally anything other more productive. So yes, I can "easily" afford it, but it doesn't mean that the energy consumption of my gaming rig hasn't affected how I think about it. Any future hardware upgrades will also be impacted by this - there is no way I'm buying a GPU with 500W TDP, even if again, I can afford the energy bills.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  > If some of Nvidia's next generation 4xxx series GPUs are close to 1000w draw as many rumors suggest Those rumors are for millisecond long transient spikes, not an average of anything. So basically the rumor is a 500w peak load. Just like how the current 350-400w GPUs have transient spikes to upwards of 800w. It's not a problem in terms of power consumption (although obviously the increase from 400w to 500w would be), rather it's an issue with over-current protection in power supplies tripping. It's a "need bigger capacitors" type problem.
secondcoming 4y ago
> don't care as much about power bills Not yet!
musicale 4y ago
> that people who regularly invest in top end hardware don't care as much about power bills It adds up, especially in data centers where you end up needing even more megawatts of power and cooling capacity.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> All these power hungry beasts coming out of Intel and NVIDIA feel quite out of sync with the zeitgeist in a world that's worried about the power bill - These CPUs aren't consuming 250W all the time. Those are peak numbers. Both Intel and AMD are providing huge efficiency gains, too. Rumors show the new i7 13700T Raptor Lake part can have a 35W mobile TDP and still outperform a Ryzen 7 5800X: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13700t-raptor-lake-allegedly-faster-than-5800x-35w https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-13700t-raptor-lake-a... Speed scales nonlinearly with power. These high TDP parts are halo parts meant for enthusiast builds where it doesn't matter that the machine draws a lot of power for an hour or two of gaming. It's also trivially easy to turn down the maximum power limit in the BIOS if that's what someone wants. The power consumption isn't a fixed feature of the CPU. It's a performance/power tradeoff that can be adjusted at use time.

jorvi 4y ago
Its still pretty terrible from an optimal performance viewpoint. I can undervolt my 3070Ti by ~100mV, dropping performance by ~6% but dropping temperature by about 10C, or 13%, and dropping fan speed from PS3 to inaudible for anything <90% load.
RedShift1 4y ago
> for an hour or two of gaming U gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers.
TakeBlaster16 4y ago
Just adding to what you said, a 24-core CPU won't get anywhere near peak power usage during gaming. Most games only use a handful of cores. The only way you'll approach it is with parallelizable productivity work like video encoding or compiling code.
- ForOldHack 4y ago
  My nephew, B, got his 16+8 i9, during Path of Exile, to peak at 250W, and use all 24 cores. He is running at 5.2Ghz, and using air cooled. We are not sure at all how it uses e-(efficiency) cores, when it has 16 p-cores w/ hyper threading, but it all did show up in the new dark mode task manager.

crisdux 4y ago

If you consider the mainstream products of Intel and Nvidia, they have way more moderate power consumption. These products with massive power draw are ultra enthusiast products. They are an outlier. You could build a great PC now with a RTX 3060 and a mainstream CPU that would be fine with a 500~ watt PSU. As technologists, we should support manufacturers pushing the limit in power and performance. It helps drive overall efficiency and move technology forward.

coconut08 4y ago
where is the amd/nvidia/intel product that offers comparable performance at a power draw that is anywhere near m1?
- crisdux 4y ago
  I believe AMD Ryzen 6000 mobile cpus can hold their own against the apple m1. They have comparable performance and can be set by the manufacturer at a TDP comparable to the m1(and still perform well). Except for mainly m1 optimized apps, GPU performance should be pretty comparable too. Ryzen integrated graphics perform better in gaming.
epolanski 4y ago
Power consumption doubled at least even on mainstream and keep increasing gen over gen. 1070 vs 3070 is +52٪ average (145 vs 220w) and +66% (154 vs 250w) sustained. 2070 vs 3070 is +10% (195) or +24% (203) sustained. Even the 3060 you defend draws power as older flagships and 500w arent enough even for mainstream gaming. And it keeps getting worse both on gpu and cpu size. We aren't technologists but consumers, and reality is that x86 and gpus are in near duopolys so the 3 companies involved have little reasons to do a better job and it's clear Apple socs or more and more cloud moving into arm have not been enough of wake up calls.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  And yet energy efficiency continues to improve: https://tpucdn.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-ti-founders-edition/images/energy-efficiency.png https://tpucdn.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-ti-founder... In fact, the 3070 is significantly more power efficient than the 1070 is. Because while yes power is up 50%, performance is up 100%. So performance per watt has continued to improve even as power consumption has also increased. The reality of power consumption is that it's the main lever to pull right now to deliver generational gains. It's the same lever Apple pulled for the M2 even. > more and more cloud moving into arm have not been enough of wake up calls. You mean the ARM enterprise SoCs that use just as much power as x86 does to deliver on average worse performance?

babypuncher 4y ago

In Intel's case, they need to push these insane TDPs in order to even dream of performance parity with AMD and Apple. All those years spinning their wheels on 14nm+++++++++++ are biting them in the ass.

neals 4y ago

I don't know, we found Helium-3 on the moon this week, so I think it might be fine.

agumonkey 4y ago

netburst was the first thing that came to mind

xani_ 4y ago

They are in development for years, not last 6 months

bee_rider 4y ago

I wonder what % of the overall power bill a PC actually consumes. My gut would say it doesn't compare, really, to the water heater or air conditioner, but it would be good to see numbers.

Arrath 4y ago
I would love some PSU metering ability, to see actual data about how much juice my PC is pulling down. Other than getting a kill a watt meter, how could one go about this?
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  Knockoff meters are like $10 on Amazon. Not a bad investment.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    I have what is probably a close spiritual cousin of one of those, and while it even touts a power factor display, it also loves to show ridiculously high values during idle consumption for anything involving some sort of power electronics (not just for my computer, but for example for my washing machine, too – it shows sensible values while the heating element runs, or when the motor actually turns, but in-between it shows nonsensically high values). It is a few years old, though, so maybe by now quality standards have improved even for those kinds of cheapo-meters…
- paulmd 4y ago
  They make "digital PSUs" like the Corsair AXi series that can talk to your PC over a comm port.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Some UPSes can show how much power is being drawn by everything connected to it, in this case presumably your computer. You probably want a UPS anyway if you've got a power guzzling (and thus presumably expensive) machine.
- 4y ago

justapassenger 4y ago

Power consumption is an issue, but worrying about CPUs of a gaming machine is like worrying about straws in the context of the pollution. Electricity needs of an average household in western world are going to increase a lot in coming decades, with transition to more electric heating, cooking, cars, etc. Gaming machine power usage is minuscule compared to those.

jbkkd 4y ago
The major difference between a CPU and, say, an oven, is that the former runs 24/7, whereas an the latter would run for a short period of time. Back of the envelope calculation here: Assuming an average oven consumes 2kWh, and a CPU 0.1kWh: Oven for four hours (average weekly usage) would be 2 * 4 = 8kWh weekly. CPU for 24 hours, 7 days a week = 0.1 * 24 * 7 = 16.8kWh weekly.
- Dinjector 4y ago
  The flaws in your calculations are apparent when we realize that modern CPUs clock down when they are not busy. You would assume this would be common knowledge on a site called Hacker News.
- gspr 4y ago
  Interesting choice of units, kWh per hour?
epolanski 4y ago
Just because energy needs keep increasing it's not a good reason to be okay they do. While most house electronics keep pushing to consume less, computers go in the opposite direction. This also adds tons of heat in my laptops or the air. Working or gaming in a small room during hot days is painful. Even consoles making noises of a turbo jet are nowadays considered normal. It's a disaster.