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The internet eats up less energy than you might think

nytimes.com

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Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#71

Post by unhammer »

ashtonkem wrote: post #33
maccard wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree eith everything you've said, but with one caveat - the resale market for cars and consumer electronics is completely different. Everyone I know has a drawer full of old laptops/chargers/phones that were purchased new and are only destined for landfill. Meanwhile, cars get reused long after their first owner gets rid of them even if they replace them every two years.

It’s certainly much easier to keep a used car running for a decade than it is to keep a used phone running, that’s for sure. And there’s a market specifically designed to support that too. I think the most realistic choice here is to not upgrade phones every 1-2 years, but stretch it to 3. The recent trend of Apple to not include all the accessories in the box is probably a net good, given how many chargers almost co…

It's sad that 3 is considered a stretch. In Norway, you actually have 5 years of "reklamasjonsrett" (right to get it repaired or replaced if there's some fault the producer should have known about). And Samsung gives security updates for 4 years these days, so you don't even need to run unofficial Androids for the first four years (though really there should be some law about providing security updates, cf. the recent mybook incident and Internet of unpatched Things)

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#72

Post by jeffbee »

southerntofu wrote: post #20
ppf wrote: post #8

This article is very light on details. I'm also not sure what the difference between "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" is. It also completely ignores (as does everyone else) the 700lb gorilla in the room - the embedded energy content of all of the computing equipment, from the video camera used to film content, to the networking equipment and data centre servers, to the final device used to consume t…

> "traditional data centres"and "cloud data centres" There is no difference hardware-wise. The difference is our cloud overlords have been promoting "on-demand scaling" as a proof "serverless hosting" is superior to traditional ways because it's greener and "we can shutdown machines when there's no demands". Which is arguably true, but so short-sighted it hurts to think journalists will fall into this trap. > to the…

> There is no difference hardware-wise

The difference between sophisticated (Google, Amazon, Facebook) cloud data centers and traditional corporate data centers is Extremely Large™. Traditional ones are characterized by things like big central UPS systems, redundant AC/DC power supplies in each host, remote-control PDUs, overblown air conditioners, etc. Cloud data centers are typified by non-redundant power supplies with either distributed UPS systems, or no UPS, DC-to-point-of-load, and marginal ventilation where the cold aisles are hotter than the hot aisles of traditional data centers.

> Internet infrastructure as a whole was estimated to use several percent of the world's electricity

Well, if you define "several" as "almost 2%" then yes, but mostly in traditional data centers. Moving to clouds improves this figure. It is estimated that half of global IT power consumption is in cooling and power delivery, meaning the industry as a whole has a PUE of 2.0, whereas Google, Facebook, and Amazon have PUEs of about 1.1. In other words, moving workloads to the cloud can save almost half of the power.

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#73

Post by papandada »

iNane9000 wrote: post #48
floatboth wrote: post #43

> Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers. Exaggerated or not, what's aggravating is that Bitcoin is literally secured by the consumption of power through wasting it on hashing. To process the same amount of transactions per second in a non-trustless (trustful?) system, you'd need, like, a few Raspberry P…

“exaggerated by some researchers” I’m beginning to detect a pattern here. Exaggerating researchers are on the rise. It feels as though researchers might be incentivized to exaggerate. The news media help them with that. Maybe we need more research in this area.

This raises a philosophy 101 survey course worth of epistemological problems in my head.

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#74

Post by [deleted] »

latchkey wrote: post #70

"But Bitcoin, the scientists say, is something different — and a worry. The efficiency trends elsewhere in tech are blunted because Bitcoin’s specialized software churns through ever more computing cycles as more people try to create, buy and sell digital currency." No, increased Bitcoin usage does not increase the amount of energy needed to process transactions. More people are mining (and thus burning more power),…

[deleted]

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#75

Post by nonameiguess »

zamadatix wrote: post #47
floatboth wrote: post #43

> Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers. Exaggerated or not, what's aggravating is that Bitcoin is literally secured by the consumption of power through wasting it on hashing. To process the same amount of transactions per second in a non-trustless (trustful?) system, you'd need, like, a few Raspberry P…

I'm not a fan of Bitcoin at all but that argument could be used for anything - "what's aggravating is that cars are literally moved by the consumption of power through wasting it on combustion in the engine", "what's aggravating is that computers are literally operated by the consumption of power to waste it on browsing HN", "what's aggravating is that TV images are literally sent by the consumption of power through…

The same argument can't be made for other goods. Bitcoin bakes the energy cost of transaction processing into the security model. Security and ownership transfer for cars and televisions relies on good old-fashioned physical locks and paper records. That has other inefficiencies, but not much energy cost. The introduction of the internal combustion engine to the world definitely involved some tradeoffs in terms of pollution and mineral extraction, but it was always possible to make cars more efficient without breaking the basis of the ownership record for cars.

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#76

Post by patrick451 »

zamadatix wrote: post #67
leetcrew wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe I'm missing a semantic argument here, but don't computers always convert ~100% of their input power to waste heat? if my cpu consumes 140W, all of that gets dissipated through the heatspreader (perhaps minus a minuscule quantity of potential energy storing register/cache state).

If 100% of the input power was given to waste heat then your computer would just be a resistance heater and not a computer. Computing information is work which requires energy (which will also eventually end up as heat in the long run, as will all energy, just not waste heat) and there is a limit on how efficiently you can compute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle . I.e. it's not possible to comput…

I find myself dubious of the claim that after an hour of isolated number crunching, my GPU has done anything aside from generate heat (that wikipedia page doesn't appear to mention anything about computing information). If only 95% of it became waste heat, where is the 5%? Given that computing information with a computer is just switching transistors on and off in a clever way, it makes no sense that if we are unclever, then suddenly all of the heat becomes "waste".

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#77

Post by NeutronStar »

patrick451 wrote: post #76
zamadatix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 100% of the input power was given to waste heat then your computer would just be a resistance heater and not a computer. Computing information is work which requires energy (which will also eventually end up as heat in the long run, as will all energy, just not waste heat) and there is a limit on how efficiently you can compute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle . I.e. it's not possible to comput…

I find myself dubious of the claim that after an hour of isolated number crunching, my GPU has done anything aside from generate heat (that wikipedia page doesn't appear to mention anything about computing information). If only 95% of it became waste heat, where is the 5%? Given that computing information with a computer is just switching transistors on and off in a clever way, it makes no sense that if we are unclev…

If you run in a circle, have you produced no work?

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#78

Post by jl6 »

floatboth wrote: post #43

> Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers. Exaggerated or not, what's aggravating is that Bitcoin is literally secured by the consumption of power through wasting it on hashing. To process the same amount of transactions per second in a non-trustless (trustful?) system, you'd need, like, a few Raspberry P…

The issue with Bitcoin is that there’s no cap on potential power consumption. It would eat up the sun if someone thought that would improve their returns.

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#79

Post by zamadatix »

patrick451 wrote: post #76
zamadatix wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 100% of the input power was given to waste heat then your computer would just be a resistance heater and not a computer. Computing information is work which requires energy (which will also eventually end up as heat in the long run, as will all energy, just not waste heat) and there is a limit on how efficiently you can compute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle . I.e. it's not possible to comput…

I find myself dubious of the claim that after an hour of isolated number crunching, my GPU has done anything aside from generate heat (that wikipedia page doesn't appear to mention anything about computing information). If only 95% of it became waste heat, where is the 5%? Given that computing information with a computer is just switching transistors on and off in a clever way, it makes no sense that if we are unclev…

> that wikipedia page doesn't appear to mention anything about computing information

From the opening of the Wikipedia page:

'Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment".'

Computation is in the first sentence, it's mentioned by name 8 times in the opening section - information 6 times. I'm not really sure how you came to the conclusion it doesn't mention anything about computing information. Even skimming it's hard to find a spot not mentioning it directly, by name.

> Given that computing information with a computer is just switching transistors on and off in a clever way, it makes no sense that if we are unclever, then suddenly all of the heat becomes "waste".

What you call "clever" and "unclever" are (essentially) ways of describing how entropy was changed. Another way of thinking about it is there is a very specific order to where energy needs to go and how it needs to be arranged to be "clever" and calculate something vs unclever and not have the answer to the number crunching problem.

Also note there is a difference between "energy that eventually ends up as heat" and "waste heat". All work will result in heat if you follow it long enough, some energy spent doing that will not go towards the amount of work done but will still end up as heat. The latter is known as waste heat. Waste heat is not just "heat I ended up with at the end".

Re: The internet eats up less energy than you might think

#80

Post by coryrc »

zamadatix wrote: post #47
floatboth wrote: post #43

> Even the predicted environmental impact of Bitcoin, which does require lots of computing firepower, has been considerably exaggerated by some researchers. Exaggerated or not, what's aggravating is that Bitcoin is literally secured by the consumption of power through wasting it on hashing. To process the same amount of transactions per second in a non-trustless (trustful?) system, you'd need, like, a few Raspberry P…

I'm not a fan of Bitcoin at all but that argument could be used for anything - "what's aggravating is that cars are literally moved by the consumption of power through wasting it on combustion in the engine", "what's aggravating is that computers are literally operated by the consumption of power to waste it on browsing HN", "what's aggravating is that TV images are literally sent by the consumption of power through…

If the heat from bitcoin mining was used to replace resistance heat in existing places, then it would be okay.
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