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Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
41–50 of 174 posts
Re: Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
#42What i don't understand is how a phone can be so powerful with so little watt usage. especially compared to a PC
Phones are much less powerful than PCs, but they feel comparably fast because most software developers waste exactly as much performance as they can get away with. The phone app developers are forced to write better, faster code than the PC app developers, just as PC app developers ten years ago were forced to write better code than PC app developers are today.
So so true. Every time I go back to programming microcontrollers in C I'm amazed at how much can be done with just a little code. We waste so much on fluff. But then, we do enjoy the fluff.
Re: Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of how inefficient computers actually are compared to cells. But I just don't really see the relevance of the comparison. Computers are so much more efficient that so many things in our world that we could much more easily improve the efficiency of: it would be great to make artificial computers as efficient as our brains but sinking resources into the effort rather than addressing…
The comparison is misguided, I agree. Those teeny 20 watts the brain is using are extracted by killing plants and animals. How about measuring the amount of death per computation? Also, let's not forget about the enormous time, space and energy used by evolution to make humans. Nothing we invented can rival that kind of resource usage. Even in Deep Learning, performant models require more data and compute. You can't…
What about bacteria? Unfortunately weighing the value of life is hard. As cute as kittens, and spiders, daffidls and protozoa are, we aren't equal. And evolution did not 'make humans', and we are not the intended product of the big bang. Seems the ultimate hubris to bill the total energy expended by the universe so far to the creation of us forum posting meatbags.
Re: Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
#44> Precise estimates vary, but currently about 5 percent of all energy consumption in the U.S. goes just to running computers 30% goes on transport. > the human brain is a computer. This particular computer uses some 10–20 percent of all the calories that a human consumes So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20. I'm not saying computers can't or shouldn't be made…
You could probably cut that consumption in half if people stopped using interpreted languages in production, quit telling curious young programmers that early optimization is evil or that memory is an implementation detail, etc. etc. The computer is very efficient, electrical engineers toil and sweat a great deal to make them so. Then we build things with Ruby and Python and make things 2 orders of magnitude less eff…
Is time or energy a more scarce resource?
Re: Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
#45> Precise estimates vary, but currently about 5 percent of all energy consumption in the U.S. goes just to running computers 30% goes on transport. > the human brain is a computer. This particular computer uses some 10–20 percent of all the calories that a human consumes So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20. I'm not saying computers can't or shouldn't be made…
>So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20.
This comparison doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's not even comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to the concept of taste.
Furthermore these percentages don't really tell you much regarding efficiency, I'm sure there are less developed societies where computers count for less than 5% of all energy consumption, doesn't mean that their computers are more efficient.
Re: Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
#46> Precise estimates vary, but currently about 5 percent of all energy consumption in the U.S. goes just to running computers 30% goes on transport. > the human brain is a computer. This particular computer uses some 10–20 percent of all the calories that a human consumes So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20. I'm not saying computers can't or shouldn't be made…
comparing these two percentages seems very esoteric. Heat dissipated by a cpu (just a function of thermodynamic inefficiency) vs fraction of electricity used by society to use computers (a function of a billion human things like economical ease of access to computers, quantity of computing needed for entertainment, availability of resources to build computers)
Re: Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
#47Re: Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comparison is misguided, I agree. Those teeny 20 watts the brain is using are extracted by killing plants and animals. How about measuring the amount of death per computation? Also, let's not forget about the enormous time, space and energy used by evolution to make humans. Nothing we invented can rival that kind of resource usage. Even in Deep Learning, performant models require more data and compute. You can't…
What about bacteria? Unfortunately weighing the value of life is hard. As cute as kittens, and spiders, daffidls and protozoa are, we aren't equal. And evolution did not 'make humans', and we are not the intended product of the big bang. Seems the ultimate hubris to bill the total energy expended by the universe so far to the creation of us forum posting meatbags.
There would be no forum posting meatbags if not for evolution and its enormous resource usage. While I agree that nature did not 'intend' to make humans from the beginning, we, as humans, can't just write it off. Those bacteria are an important step in our cellular apparatus, and people are comparing computers to brains (brain cells at work), here.
And as long as we can't get our energy without killing other living organisms, the energy brain uses can't be compared to the energy computers use. It's physically the same, but morally not. Of course you could say computers are here because humans have killed living organisms to feed themselves, so computers partake into that, but we'd end in a loop and never reach any conclusion.
Re: Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article goes on to explain just how wasteful our computers are, compared to the computations that go on in cells (which is a staggeringly large amount of computation, given their speed and abundance). > But the thermodynamic efficiency of this computation—the amount of energy required by a ribosome per elementary operation—is many orders of magnitude superior to the thermodynamic efficiency of our current artific…
Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware of how inefficient computers actually are compared to cells. But I just don't really see the relevance of the comparison. Computers are so much more efficient that so many things in our world that we could much more easily improve the efficiency of: it would be great to make artificial computers as efficient as our brains but sinking resources into the effort rather than addressing…
I don't see how you're reading this headline as "alarmist". It's a valid question worth exploring.
Re: Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
#50> Precise estimates vary, but currently about 5 percent of all energy consumption in the U.S. goes just to running computers 30% goes on transport. > the human brain is a computer. This particular computer uses some 10–20 percent of all the calories that a human consumes So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20. I'm not saying computers can't or shouldn't be made…
>So society's computer uses 5 percent and our own, evolved over millions of years, uses up to 20. This comparison doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's not even comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to the concept of taste. Furthermore these percentages don't really tell you much regarding efficiency, I'm sure there are less developed societies where computers count for less than 5% of all energy consu…
Calories and can be converted to Joules. The amount of energy to run a computer (a human computer or a physical one) is interesting to me personally, as is comparing the amount of extra calories (and thus, extra emissions) it costs me to ride my bike 20 miles to work vs. driving a gasoline car.