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Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

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41–50 of 132 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#41
Chips aren't a living thing. You take some sand, project light onto it, dissolve the parts not exposed to light, and now it can execute instructions. No big deal. Electricity is required as an input, though, so when it doesn't have anything useful to do it can avoid consuming electricity. Therefore, it's not clear to me that it's a waste to leave it off or idle. Are you upset that your bed remains unused for the 16 hours a day when you're not sleeping? Probably not.

(Even if you use resistive heating to heat your living space, it's not necessarily a win to make a computer convert that electricity into heat and computation results. They're 100% efficient, but heat pumps are MORE than 100% efficient. So unless you really want the compute results, it's a waste of electricity.)

Another angle that people always seem confused about is latency versus throughput. When you decide to look up cat pictures, your computer needs to perform billions of calculations in a very short period of time. That means that chips have to be able to do a lot of work in a short interval of time, or nobody will want them. A higher utilization could be achieved by building a machine that is less powerful, but spreads the cat picture rendering calculations out over time; if you want to see 8 cat pictures a day, and 100 compute units are required to display a cat picture, then you only need a CPU that can process 0.01 compute units per second. But, then the human is idle for 10,000 seconds in the time between wanting to see a cat picture and seeing the cat picture, which is annoying to the humans. So the chips have to be "overpowered" to be able to display cat pictures in a timeframe that is non-annoying to humans.

TL;DR: don't feel sad for engraved chunks of sand.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#44
That's how consumer devices are intended to be used. The manufacturers don't give people what they need to troubleshoot, reconfigure or upgrade them. Most people don't know how to maintain a computer, so this makes sense. If you want to get more lifetime out of your computers, you have to get good at them. Realistically, that means switching to Linux.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#45
In earlier days, this used to be a fairly common attitude for sysadmins. The context then was different - systems were a lot more expensive and energy consumption wasn't considered at all.

The argument was, basically, you can't save cycles. You get so many per second, whether or not you use them. And not using a machine you dropped mid-six figures for seems like a terrible business waste.

Vastly cheaper machines, ecological crises, battery powered devices, and security eclipsing performance in importance changes that analysis a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#47
The amount of energy that goes into the manufacturing to point of sale, should also be considered when a newer more efficient tech comes along. I'm still using a 17" macbook pro for the 1920x1200 screen, it's still fast and I hacked mojave 10.14 onto the unit even with a bad primary GPU.

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#48
What bothers me is that I don't know how to squeeze all of the juice out of my CPU (or any programmable device for that matter). I see instances of the Jevons effect everywhere (e.g. the use of Electron), and on the other side I see DOS-era programmers whose experience transfer really well to more modern machines, so they know how to get the best throughput on their data, how to isolate slow but necessary parts of their programs (like certain OS APIs). I feel like having started programming on a high level language affected the way I program even in lower level languages, so I don't know how to do better resource utilization, or how to do I/O efficiently.

So I don't have a problem with, say, writing a script in Python even though it's not the most efficient use of my CPU, because I'm just looking to get things done. But when I have a problem that needs horsepower (and I know my 8 core 3.6 GHz can absolutely deliver that), I don't know how to tell it to do it. It doesn't help that many programmers' first thought would be to go for the cloud, when a single computer can be much faster than a bunch of AWS VMs

Another example is the .kkrieger demo, which seems like wizardry when you've only seen similar things done in Unity/Unreal

Re: Ask HN: Do you feel bad when devices aren't utilized to the extreme?

#50

What bothers me is that I don't know how to squeeze all of the juice out of my CPU (or any programmable device for that matter). I see instances of the Jevons effect everywhere (e.g. the use of Electron), and on the other side I see DOS-era programmers whose experience transfer really well to more modern machines, so they know how to get the best throughput on their data, how to isolate slow but necessary parts of th…

My issue is concurrency is so hard. One time tasks don't make sense to make concurrent, b/c migrating from sync to async takes 2-5x longer + higher bug risks and more complexity.

So most tasks remain inefficient...

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