3 ms·

> and contains significant embedded carbon emissions Hi - thanks for the insightful comment - could you please expand on the above? Genuinely curious :)

lmz 3mo ago
"a lot of carbon was emitted while making it"
NDlurker 3mo ago
Reduce, reuse, recycle
pjc50 3mo ago
From the paper: "Second, memory dominates the carbon footprint of the fleet [8], accounting for 69% of CO2 emissions and posing a significant sustainability challenge [4]. DRAM dominates datacenter embodied CO2 largely because it is ubiquitous and deployed in large quantities across essentially all servers. Based on our internal fleet data, and aligned with studies from other hyperscalers such as Microsoft [33], memory is one of the largest single embodied-emissions contributors" [8] U. Gupta, M. Elgamal, G. Hills, G.-Y. Wei, H.-H. S. Lee, D. Brooks, and C.-J. Wu, “ACT: Designing Sustainable Computer Systems with an Architectural Carbon Modeling Tool,” in Proceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA’22), 2022. [4] D. Azevedo, M. Patterson, J. Pouchet, and R. Tipley, “Carbon usage effectiveness (cue): A green grid data center sustainability metric,” White paper, vol. 32, 2010. [33] J. Wang, D. S. Berger, F. Kazhamiaka, C. Irvene, C. Zhang, E. Choukse, K. Frost, R. Fonseca, B. Warrier, C. Bansal, J. Stern, R. Bianchini, and A. Sriraman, “Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon,” in Proceedings of the 51st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ser. ISCA ’24, 2025, p. 452–470. Not a reference, but I found https://www.interface-eu.org/publications/semiconductor-emission-explorer https://www.interface-eu.org/publications/semiconductor-emis... which goes into great detail on the subject. I hadn't realized there were significant emissions of fluorinated gases directly from the fabs, which is mildly alarming. Although it looks like there has been a crackdown on this either politically or through ESG policies.
- yieldcrv 3mo ago
  > recycle pls > not like that this is insightful to me as well, I'm glad to know modern memory is less polluting in use but now I wonder about how it compares to the manufacturing process
  - pjc50 3mo ago
    What do you mean by "not like that"?
    - yieldcrv 3mo ago
      The RAM has been recycled but it has worse emissions than throwing it away and using newer RAM
ryukoposting 3mo ago
I see what you did there.
Barbing 3mo ago
Settle a debate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888401 :)

lmz 3mo ago

"a lot of carbon was emitted while making it"

NDlurker 3mo ago

Reduce, reuse, recycle

pjc50 3mo ago

From the paper: "Second, memory dominates the carbon footprint of the fleet [8], accounting for 69% of CO2 emissions and posing a significant sustainability challenge [4]. DRAM dominates datacenter embodied CO2 largely because it is ubiquitous and deployed in large quantities across essentially all servers. Based on our internal fleet data, and aligned with studies from other hyperscalers such as Microsoft [33], memory is one of the largest single embodied-emissions contributors" [8] U. Gupta, M. Elgamal, G. Hills, G.-Y. Wei, H.-H. S. Lee, D. Brooks, and C.-J. Wu, “ACT: Designing Sustainable Computer Systems with an Architectural Carbon Modeling Tool,” in Proceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA’22), 2022. [4] D. Azevedo, M. Patterson, J. Pouchet, and R. Tipley, “Carbon usage effectiveness (cue): A green grid data center sustainability metric,” White paper, vol. 32, 2010. [33] J. Wang, D. S. Berger, F. Kazhamiaka, C. Irvene, C. Zhang, E. Choukse, K. Frost, R. Fonseca, B. Warrier, C. Bansal, J. Stern, R. Bianchini, and A. Sriraman, “Designing Cloud Servers for Lower Carbon,” in Proceedings of the 51st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, ser. ISCA ’24, 2025, p. 452–470. Not a reference, but I found https://www.interface-eu.org/publications/semiconductor-emission-explorer https://www.interface-eu.org/publications/semiconductor-emis... which goes into great detail on the subject. I hadn't realized there were significant emissions of fluorinated gases directly from the fabs, which is mildly alarming. Although it looks like there has been a crackdown on this either politically or through ESG policies.

yieldcrv 3mo ago
> recycle pls > not like that this is insightful to me as well, I'm glad to know modern memory is less polluting in use but now I wonder about how it compares to the manufacturing process
- pjc50 3mo ago
  What do you mean by "not like that"?
  - yieldcrv 3mo ago
    The RAM has been recycled but it has worse emissions than throwing it away and using newer RAM

ryukoposting 3mo ago

I see what you did there.

Barbing 3mo ago

Settle a debate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888401 :)