This is great for the price. My main complaint is power consumption. Intel is still delivering wonderful performance, but the performance per watt isn’t great at all.
Beyond that, at scale, is it good to have high-consumption computers all over the world before we have widespread renewable energy? Probably not ideal.
As far as energy use we’re it’s such a tiny amount of energy compared to any given appliance.
I think others are concerned with a trend that extrapolates to something insane power consumption where power use grows exponentially to megawatts where clock speed is growing asompotically to say 10ghz
Back in the Amiga era, I inverted the PSU fan of a very loaded 2000 (lots of memory, SCSI, Video Toaster, etc) and piped in the output of an air-conditioner directly to it (with a little bit of epoxy sculpting). It stopped crashing and worked happy for a long time until being replaced by a boring Windows box running NT.
Tbh I like it in winter, warms my living room up nicely. In summer I just run my aircons more, but I also usually game less because the weather is nice.
I doubt too many computers based on these parts will be running that hot for any significant time. It's much more likely to experience bursty loads - compiling something big, crunching a massive amount of data - than sustained ones, such as a build server or something similar.
If the CPU is managing GPU-based number crunching, keeping it busy will require a lot of GPUs, which will make the CPU's thermal output a rounding error next to the rest of the data furnace.
I don't like noise.
On an energy basis the “performance” cores in an Intel CPU are more efficient than the “efficiency” cores.
My i9 desktop will start to spin the fans up with light web browsing.
To be precise, even at true zero load, an i9-10850k (what I've got) draws 25-30w. Any sort of load at all and it gets to 60+w. A gaming type load is well over 125w.
i9 is much hotter than i7, especially the high end ones. When I bought the cpu the only thing higher (without getting into server grade stuff) was the 10900k which was basically unobtanium.
The alternative is shipping a power constrained for…no gain? Letting the cpu boost this high is only a boon for people who want it and is an imagined negative.
But those i9 ks sku can achieve a couple hundred extra MHz. But have a much higher base clock speed.