20 ms·

> Computing bottlenecks change over time. As disk space, disk bandwidth, and internet bandwidth increases, older image codecs that squeeze every last bit out of

• M3L0NM4N 4y ago
  Orrr, the grid is moved towards renewable energy so that the fear of global warming doesn't stunt technological advancements?
  • xipix 4y ago
    "Technological advancements" is a term that is open to interpretation. To many, it means advancements in terms of reducing CO2 emissions.
  • kreetx 4y ago
    Yeah, it seems to me (not an expert!) that energy will cost less and less over time, both in terms of how much you pay and how much CO2 is produced, thus CO2 production won't have much relation to image compression.
  • 1337shadow 4y ago
    Renewable energies require gaz and coal backups.
    • astrange 4y ago
      Or nuclear or geothermal. Or a lot of batteries. Main problem with the grid in California is when it sets fire to things or windstorms cause an outage. The generation side is holding up pretty well.
  • imoverclocked 4y ago
    Optimizing for a metric that benefits all of humanity is not stunting technological improvements. It’s improving in a direction that makes human-sense instead of some other kind of sense. Also, renewable energy doesn’t mean infinite/limitless energy. It often means there are more limitations than non-renewable counterparts. Eg: storing energy is still not a solved problem without really toxic (environmentally and politically) materials.
• dspillett 4y ago
  Not a bad question, though a difficult concept to measure in reality. We can estimate the emissions caused by crypto-currency as that is almost entirely CPU-bound by about the same amount (or an easy to estimate average) per unit. The costs of transmission and storage are going to be relatively minor. For images the compression cost, while the process is similarly CPU-bound, is pretty small unless you are doing something small like compressing to hundreds/thousands of algorithm/parameter combinations and picking the best result (perhaps by some heuristic more complex than final file size). Also transmission and strorage costs are difficult to estimate because for any given image how do you guestimate how many times it will move and be copied? Having said that, the article's statement that: “[as] bandwidth savings from overly lossy image codecs will become meaningless, [] the CPU/user time and battery or grid energy spent on complex decompression steps will be wasted.” implies that energy use is at least a coincidental consideration here. Though image quality is by far the primary concern, and that despite being subjective is probably an easier metric to measure in this case, with compression time likely to be ahead of energy use too.
  • makapuf 4y ago
    Note that CO2 emissions also come from the device construction. So optimize for old devices (that will also make newer ones sleep more).
• dale_glass 4y ago
  Isn't that more or less the same thing in the end? Storage at this point is plentiful. Most people can live just fine with 1 TB of it, which is trivially found in both HDD and SSD forms. Using less saves you nothing, as the media is still there. Bandwidth is also plentiful and available 24/7. It's also very bursty -- you only download your game once, while you may play it a lot. So saving 50% download time makes no difference energy-wise. What we can control a lot is CPU power usage. We now have 16 core consumer CPUs that are designed to sleep when not in use, so difference in power usage at runtime can be dramatic. So an algorithm that trades disk space for decoding efficiency is probably the best way to save power.
  • vintermann 4y ago
    You only download a game once? I think the average game in my Steam folders updates itself with at least 2-300 MB between every time I play them.
    • dale_glass 4y ago
      Okay, but that's a rounding error. Gigabit internet is widely available, I'm making preparations to upgrade to 10G. So on my current connection, that's maybe 2-5 seconds of download time. Meanwhile, the router is on constantly anyway, so whether it's 200 MB or 400MB makes next to zero difference energy-wise.
      • secondcoming 4y ago
        What about the rest of the world?
        • dale_glass 4y ago
          Doesn't make any difference either? Okay, say you're on a 10 Mbps connection. That update takes you what, 5 minutes? Yeah, that's an annoyance, but that's time for a coffee or a bathroom break. Most games don't update daily or anywhere close to it, so your download time is still going to be <1% of your play time for most people. If your hardware/connection is really awful, yeah, maybe downloading the latest DOOM isn't a great experience, but luckily there's no lack of smaller things to play. Either way, it's completely irrelevant carbon/energy-wise. Your power usage is going to be dominated by a game trying to render 3D graphics at 60 FPS, not by the tiny increase of the power draw of a router during an update download.
• G3rn0ti 4y ago
  > Why not optimize for CO2 emission instead ? How if you don’t know where the electricity comes from powering the hardware your image decoder runs on.
• userbinator 4y ago
  What is with this new trend of eco-virtue-signaling? The best way to "optimize for CO2 emission" is to just stop living.
  • bob1029 4y ago
    Energy savings in mobile form factors makes sense to me, but I agree that worrying about emissions due to desktop/server workloads is laughable when we still haven't written native replacements for things like Teams and Discord. At scale, those 2 applications are probably worth more emissions than an actual Panamax-sized cargo vessel.
• astrange 4y ago
  The best way to optimize for CO2 is to ask the user to do it at the right time of day for their grid. Otherwise it's the same thing as using less energy which is ~ the same thing as being faster (assuming fixed resources). But watch out for induced demand (the user turning the graphics settings up because you made the FPS better.)