8 ms·
Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do abou
by dangalf 9mo ago
Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.
- geoffschmidt 9mo agoHeat is not by itself waste. It's what electricity turns into after it's done doing computer things. Efficiency is a separate question - how many computer things you got done per unit electricity turned into heat.
- anon84873628 9mo agoHow many computer things you got done per unit electricity, and how many mechanical things you do with the temperature gradient between the computer and its heat sync. For example, kinda wasteful to cook eggs with new electrons when you could use the computer heat to help you denature those proteins. Or just put the heat in human living spaces. (Putting aside how practical that actually is... Which it isn't)
- eimrine 9mo agoGood luck with collecting that heat from air.
- mr_toad 9mo agoThere’s a minimum level of energy consumption (and thus heat) that has to be produced by computation, just because of physics. However, modern computers generate billions of times more heat than this minimum level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
- RhysU 9mo agoIt'd be super fun to take that as an axiom of physics then to see how far upwards one could build from that. Above my skills by far.
- UltraSane 9mo agoThe minimum amount of energy needed to compute decreased asymptotically to 0 as the temperature of space goes to 0. This is the reason a common sci-fi trope where advanced civilizations hibernate for extremely long times so that they can do more computation with available energy.
- ctmnt 9mo agoThat’s a common trope? Can’t say I’ve run into it. But I’d like to! What are some good examples?
- UltraSane 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestivation_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestivation_hypothesis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9sh9NpL4i8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9sh9NpL4i8 https://mindmatters.ai/2020/10/researchers-the-aliens-exist-but-they-are-sleeping/ https://mindmatters.ai/2020/10/researchers-the-aliens-exist-... https://aleph.se/andart2/space/the-aestivation-hypothesis-popular-outline-and-faq/ https://aleph.se/andart2/space/the-aestivation-hypothesis-po...
- CamperBob2 9mo agoHere you go: https://pastebin.com/raw/SUd5sLRC https://pastebin.com/raw/SUd5sLRC And it only cost 0.006 rain forests!
- Supermancho 9mo agoIn the book Calculating God, a character notes that this is a common civilization-wide choice. Living in virtual reality, rather than trying to expand into the vast expanses of space, is a common trope as much as it's a logical choice. It neatly explains the Fermi Paradox. In some fiction, like The Matrix, the choice might be forced due to cultural shifts, but the outcome is the same. A relatively sterile low-energy state civilization doing pure processing.
- 9mo ago
- stouset 9mo agoEven if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat. If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.
- robkop 9mo agoInteresting question - how much will end up as sound, or in the ever smaller tail of things like storing a bit in flash memory?
- phil21 9mo agoAlmost none. A long time ago a friend and I did the math for sound, photons (status LEDs), etc and it was a rounding error of 1% or something silly like that. And that’s ignoring that sound and photon emissions typically hit a wall or other physical surface and get converted back to heat. It all ends up as heat in the end, just depends on where that heat is dumped and if you need to cool it or not. Most watts end up being even more than the theoretical heat per watt due to said cooling needs. There is literally no way around the fact that every watt you burn for compute ends up as a watt of waste heat. The only factor you can control is how many units of compute you can achieve with that same watt.
- Terr_ 9mo agoWell, at least until somebody devises a system that transports or projects it so that the heat ends up somewhere not-Earth. It'd still be heating the universe in general, of course, even in the form of sprays of neutrinos. That reminds me of a sci-fi book, Sundiver by David Brin, where a ship is exploring the sun by firing a "refrigerator laser" to somehow pump-away excess heat and balance on the thrust.
- mrDmrTmrJ 9mo agoAll sound will end up as heat.
- 9mo ago
- anon84873628 9mo agoI think what they mean is that there is not a Carnot engine hooked up between the heat source and sink. Which theoretically something the data center could do about it.
- sixtyj 9mo agoThey could make a second floor with eggs and newborn chicken. /s
- charcircuit 9mo agoThe electricity is doing computer things, building bitcoin blocks.
- YetAnotherNick 9mo agoNo its not. It would be waste only if the there is a high temperature gradient, which is minimized in mining operation through proper cooling. It's that computation requires electricity. And almost all of the heat in bitcoin mining comes from computation, technically changing transistor state.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]