81–90 of 132 posts
I don't feel the same way about personal devices. As an extreme example, I'm happy to have a gas mask and a microcontroller powered Geiger counter in my storage room for emergency purposes and never use them ever.
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> This Linux PC I am writing this post on is coming up on 12 years old and is more than adequate for my purposes it is very very likely wasting a ton of watts doing what a secondhand stick PC such as https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08G1CCWN5 can do in less than 10 watts, so no, it is very much not adequate from a global point of view
I get what you are saying but I enable a lot of power management controls specifically so that I can run on the inverter for a long time during power outages. This was a medium-to-low-end PC when it came out so it was already decent on power usage. When the day comes that I replace the HDD with a SSD I'm sure that number will drop even more.
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I don't understand this. Does Apple market their M1 as "it depends" ? Or do they say "When you need the highest level of performance ever in a Mac notebook, there’s M1 Max.". I would be insisting Apple actually backup their claim rather than criticizing the OP.
How does marketing come in? The OP made a claim of basically (paraphrasing here): "this thing blows, it results in a 50% performance drop for test suites". I believe him for his case. Our case was showing the oppositebehavior. Thus it seems to depend. Simple logic.
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I get what you are saying but I enable a lot of power management controls specifically so that I can run on the inverter for a long time during power outages. This was a medium-to-low-end PC when it came out so it was already decent on power usage. When the day comes that I replace the HDD with a SSD I'm sure that number will drop even more.
even in low power mode, just your spinning HDD already consumes more than the whole stick computer, the very best 7200rpm can manage 8 watts from what I can find on the internet and the average is more like 20-25 watts
That's why I spin down the drive and all cron jobs run to a ram disk. The actual power-pig on my computer is the video card. I could and probably should find a used video card that is less powerful as I barely use a tiny fraction of this GPU's capabilities.
Either way I am happy with where I landed in this setup. When this rig gives out I may switch to a mini-pc or use one of my spare protectli firewalls as my daily driver.
I wish I could jailbreak my old iPhones in my drawer and turn them into an arm cluster, but I’ve forgotten the passcodes, so they are just ewaste now I guess.
No, because always running at maximum capacity is an indication that something has no room for failure, or for growth. I have a M2 MacBook Air with the most amount of RAM and storage that Apple would sell me. I'm sure its CPU sits at about 5% utilization almost the entire day. This was intentional on my part. I bought a laptop with enough "extra" capacity that it will be able to handle increased inefficiencies, bloat…
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For most consumer electronics devices, the energy that goes into manufacturing them vastly exceeds the total energy used during their lifetimes. In that sense (ignoring differences in emissions from different energy sources), from an environmental perspective it’s better to have fewer products running at a higher duty cycle (may not be applicable to high-performance workstations).
do you have any data to support that?
I was going to dispute OP's comment. Thinking of my old Athlon server that used around $20 of electricity per month, cost about $600 new IIRC (mobo+CPU+RAM), and ran for more than a decade ($2400). But there has been a concerted effort to lower device power consumption, and my current 5700G server (two generations later) uses only around $5/mo of electricity.
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For most consumer electronics devices, the energy that goes into manufacturing them vastly exceeds the total energy used during their lifetimes. In that sense (ignoring differences in emissions from different energy sources), from an environmental perspective it’s better to have fewer products running at a higher duty cycle (may not be applicable to high-performance workstations).
do you have any data to support that?
> We stress that this estimate carries some uncertainty but gives us a reasonable idea of the impact of ICT. Across studies, roughly 23% of ICT's [information and communication technologies] total footprint is from embodied emissions, yet the share of embodied emissions for user devices specifically is ca. 50%. This is because, unlike networks and data centers, user devices are only used for parts of the day and use less electricity, but are exchanged often, especially in the case of smartphones.
"embodied emissions" being emissions generated from manufacturing.
older blog discussing data from older devices and electronics:
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-d...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most consumer electronics devices, the energy that goes into manufacturing them vastly exceeds the total energy used during their lifetimes. In that sense (ignoring differences in emissions from different energy sources), from an environmental perspective it’s better to have fewer products running at a higher duty cycle (may not be applicable to high-performance workstations).
do you have any data to support that?
1. Life Cycle Assessment of Fairphone 4, showing an estimated 75% of energy use occurring during production and 16% during the lifetime of use: https://www.fairphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Fairpho...
2. Eco profile of a 13.5" Surface Laptop 5, showing 85% of energy use occurring during production and 12% during the lifetime of use: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?i...
There's no reason why distributed computing couldn't be made official, but there aren't all that many personal applications which could work across a public distributed systems and tolerate long latencies and built-in unreliability.
It would be nice to see a massively redundant distributed web/cloud where every device was part of a global server system - as opposed to just a global system for accessing remote servers. But aside from the security issues, it would need a whole new set of protocols for handling extremely robust fault-tolerance.
That's a bit more complex than setting up a spare webcam. (I tried that with a spare iPhone once, but it ran too hot for extended use.)