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Comment by mk_stjames | Hacker News Reader

It would only be considered 'wasted' if energy was free. But energy is not free, and thus choosing how to use compute resources is still important.

e.g. I own a few high powered workstations for fluid dynamics computations. If energy was free, I would be just running 'what-if' solves all the time just for the hell of it. But because energy isn't free, they stay in sleep unless I need them for what is deemed 'necessary' for research.

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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?

For a rough first pass, I would just look at monetary cost.

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.

https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(21)00188-4

> 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...

Sure. Two good sources are:

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...

now a fairphone uses 2W during use, a dual-socket server 100W in idle (!). Assuming emissions scale with weight, I'd say for a typical server, this is very different.

Still, I agree with you: design for efficiency and then mend and use efficiently.

What about for desktops? Servers operating at capacity? GPUs?

That's fair, but I have a half a dozen servers sitting in a colo with networking/energy/cooling included in the lease agreement so energy is not a concern.

I usually just run game servers with the extra RAM/cpu threads for my friends. If my elasticsearch cluster is particularly unused some days and I have extra bandwidth I might turn on wireguard and let the 450GB disk of torrents I have on disk seed. Anything that makes the btop graph look active and lively makes me feel nice.

> so energy is not a concern.

You're talking about paying for energy, some people are concerned about consuming energy.

> I might turn on wireguard and let the 450GB disk of torrents I have on disk seed

Your colo does that mind this use?

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