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The graph starts taking off in 2008 in fact and I'm willing to bet that coincides with companies like Amazon starting seriously scaling up. For instance: Visi

The graph starts taking off in 2008 in fact and I'm willing to bet that coincides with companies like Amazon starting seriously scaling up. For instance: Visits to amazon.com grew from 615 million annual visitors in 2008,[46] to more than 2 billion per month in 2022.[47] The e-commerce platform is the 14th most visited website in the world.[48] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)#Products_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)#Products_and_... I'm not fingering Amazon specifically as the culprit but when you say "algorithm" in that sense, as you point out, I'm thinking of recommender systems and Amazon's must be one of the er scaliest; probably together with Meta, and I guess Netflix. Doesn't have to be on GPUs either. CPUs need power too.

advael 2y ago
I mean while I agree that CPUs can be hungry, a lot of traditional beefycore proc tech in this time period has gone into energy efficiency and miniaturization whereas a lot of GPU tech has been all about more and more cores. Research and enterprise workstations I've worked with have increasingly required industrial power supply. Like yea raw scale's gonna be a factor but I'd also think that per-datacenter power might grow less quickly with scale if the per-server consumption wasn't drastically rising because company scale also predicts building more datacenters