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Is a phone plugged in 24/7 actually more power-efficient than a slice of a mega-optimized cloud server?

chneu 1y ago
Idk about power efficient but it's definitely more resource efficient. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Let's really stop fixating on the last one.
BLKNSLVR 1y ago
It is when it's plugged into a battery which is charged from a solar panel.
bb88 1y ago
Well, offhand, no one buys a cloud server for power efficiency, people buy into the cloud for reliability, or performance, or cost -- or some combination thereof. If you're buying ultra-power, you're forgoing power-efficiency.
- lmm 1y ago
  > no one buys a cloud server for power efficiency, people buy into the cloud for reliability, or performance, or cost -- or some combination thereof Low cost and power efficiency are pretty much the same thing for a datacenter though, since cooling is the most expensive part. Hence e.g. AWS pushing Graviton.
  - bb88 1y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong, but I would like to point out that a phone doesn't need active cooling. I just don't know if Graviton requires active cooling. And I don't know if that statement is accurate, since passive cooling would be even better than active cooling from an efficiency perspective and particularly if you also consider reliability. Less moving parts would mean higher reliability unless, eg., the thermal paste evaporated on the cpu.
    - lmm 1y ago
      > I would like to point out that a phone doesn't need active cooling. A single phone, far away from other sources of heat, used only in environments that are comfortable for humans (which may well involve active cooling at the building level), and configured to throttle down when it's used for more than a few minutes, perhaps not (although even then, I've seen phones get uncomfortably hot when gaming, and had my own phone shut down because it's too hot on occasion). If you were setting up banks of phones to run in a datacenter environment, and expecting to run them flat out, you'd probably want to actively cool them. > And I don't know if that statement is accurate, since passive cooling would be even better than active cooling from an efficiency perspective and particularly if you also consider reliability. Less moving parts would mean higher reliability unless, eg., the thermal paste evaporated on the cpu. Everything is tradeoffs. Per recent posts here, the likes of AWS are now at the point of cooling CPUs directly with datacenter-scale watercooling; essentially the building's air conditioners, rather than terminating at a fan unit on the inside, feed cooling water directly to a plate mounted onto the CPU heatsink.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  A single cloud server could host hundreds of thousands of personal static websites though. I suspect they probably do use less power than 100,000 old phones.
pharrington 1y ago
Assuming the power management is correctly setup, yes.

Idk about power efficient but it's definitely more resource efficient. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Let's really stop fixating on the last one.

BLKNSLVR 1y ago

It is when it's plugged into a battery which is charged from a solar panel.

bb88 1y ago

Well, offhand, no one buys a cloud server for power efficiency, people buy into the cloud for reliability, or performance, or cost -- or some combination thereof. If you're buying ultra-power, you're forgoing power-efficiency.

lmm 1y ago
> no one buys a cloud server for power efficiency, people buy into the cloud for reliability, or performance, or cost -- or some combination thereof Low cost and power efficiency are pretty much the same thing for a datacenter though, since cooling is the most expensive part. Hence e.g. AWS pushing Graviton.
- bb88 1y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong, but I would like to point out that a phone doesn't need active cooling. I just don't know if Graviton requires active cooling. And I don't know if that statement is accurate, since passive cooling would be even better than active cooling from an efficiency perspective and particularly if you also consider reliability. Less moving parts would mean higher reliability unless, eg., the thermal paste evaporated on the cpu.
  - lmm 1y ago
    > I would like to point out that a phone doesn't need active cooling. A single phone, far away from other sources of heat, used only in environments that are comfortable for humans (which may well involve active cooling at the building level), and configured to throttle down when it's used for more than a few minutes, perhaps not (although even then, I've seen phones get uncomfortably hot when gaming, and had my own phone shut down because it's too hot on occasion). If you were setting up banks of phones to run in a datacenter environment, and expecting to run them flat out, you'd probably want to actively cool them. > And I don't know if that statement is accurate, since passive cooling would be even better than active cooling from an efficiency perspective and particularly if you also consider reliability. Less moving parts would mean higher reliability unless, eg., the thermal paste evaporated on the cpu. Everything is tradeoffs. Per recent posts here, the likes of AWS are now at the point of cooling CPUs directly with datacenter-scale watercooling; essentially the building's air conditioners, rather than terminating at a fan unit on the inside, feed cooling water directly to a plate mounted onto the CPU heatsink.
SchemaLoad 1y ago
A single cloud server could host hundreds of thousands of personal static websites though. I suspect they probably do use less power than 100,000 old phones.

pharrington 1y ago

Assuming the power management is correctly setup, yes.