91–100 of 312 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Green energy is in the costs of 8 cents/Wh. Coal is more expansive as gas always was. Only nuclear is calculated with 2 cents/Wh ignoring the costs of the nuclear waste as this paid for by taxes in addition.
Are you missing a 'k' or 'M' on those units? 8 cents per watt-hour is obscenely expensive. A hibernating Mac m1 would cost over a dollar an hour. Just to hibernate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germany already had the highest electricity prices in the world even when gas was cheap. Green energy has become an ersatz-religion here.
Green energy is in the costs of 8 cents/Wh. Coal is more expansive as gas always was. Only nuclear is calculated with 2 cents/Wh ignoring the costs of the nuclear waste as this paid for by taxes in addition.
Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn't thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.
Just write efficient software, then you won’t need that many servers.
While this is true to a degree, development costs also come into play here. Let's simplify the problem a lot for a moment. Suppose the only thing you care about is cost and the only things you can control are the hardware you're running on and the code it runs. You can optimize your code to use less hardware, which would lower operational costs. But you also have to pay developers to optimize the code. In some cases,…
Interesting that the colo electricity cost goes up that much, that’s a lot more expensive than what I will pay as a normal consumer, I’d have thought they’d get better discounts.
Colo costs are just insane compared to consumer prices. At home: 12 or 42 €/month (details¹), depending on whether I want gigabit upload or not. Advantages: - fast LAN speeds, - don't need to go anywhere to do hardware maintenance/replacement/additions, - low cost, - partially solar powered if you have solar panels, - don't need to make things fit in a rack (can be a raspberry pi, an old laptop, or whatever you like)…
Worth it, especially because of the reasons the prices of electricity went up.
Its fascinating that electricity is really the biggest cost of computing. I put a server in my house which was supposed to save money, but actually the electricity cost was something I hadn't thought of and really adds up. esp when the AC has to run to remove the extra heat. So much old hardware out there but its going to get junked as new hw is more efficient.
In Germany, my rule of thumb was that a constant 1W load is 1€/year. This year, I had to update it, it is now more something like 3€/year. The increase is so important I am still not sure if my calculations are right! 1W x 24h x 365 = 8760Wh My current price: 0.33€/kWh (100% renewable) 8.76kWh x 0.33€/kWh = 2.89€
I guess my prices are actually a little over $0.10 and a watt over a year is a little under 10,000Wh as shown in your calculations, so those offset to make the estimate even more accurate (than necessary).
While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/london_electricity_su...
While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…
Or people will separate out heavy tasks that aren’t time critical to run them when power is abundant (when there’s wind or sun) and not when it’s scarce.
While the pricing is interesting, I think the fact it is driven by the input costs of electricity is even more telling. The fact that electricity costs is the dominating (edit, correction: marginal ) cost of cloud computing basically means that: 1) We're up against physical barriers to lowering the cost (and ecological impact) of our clouds. 2) Optimizing for less compute will pay multi-fold dividends over the next f…
Or people will separate out heavy tasks that aren’t time critical to run them when power is abundant (when there’s wind or sun) and not when it’s scarce.