> But consumer cpus use less power and having a lot of them means you can be granular with power usage and use a lot less power. Unfortunately, this simply isn

> But consumer cpus use less power and having a lot of them means you can be granular with power usage and use a lot less power. Unfortunately, this simply isn't true. There's quite a bit of "fixed" power consumption that doesn't scale with usage -- DRAM controllers, PCIe, Ethernet PHYs, etc. Not only does that power consumption not go away when a machine isn't being used, but it's all also incurred per machine that's running, so a network of many small computers will also use a lot more power on these constant loads. > I would also challenge that using more power is not a problem if your energy sourcre is nuclear or renewable. I would love to live in a world where that were the case. Sadly, it is not. Renewable does not mean free.