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Comment by supertrope | Hacker News Reader

At $0.12/kWh 1W 24/7/365 costs $1/year. Assuming you don't use sleep mode and/or wake on LAN dropping down from 50W to 10W will save $40/year.

On the environmental virtue side electronics have embodied energy usage that can surpass the lifetime electrical consumption especially if the devices are not always on.

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If you read my comment again, I specifically singles out the EU energy proces because I knew North America has much cheaper electricity which is why I specified if you have cheap energy then it probably won't matter for you.

And Europeans are definitely feeling the CoL increase.

Right. It seems paradoxical to save money by spending money on new machines. Versus low hanging fruit like turning off or sleeping unused nodes or taking a hard look at your computing footprint and downsizing.

It's not paradoxical to buy a CPU that's 5x more efficient.

Whether it is a net win for energy consumption entirely what you're using it for and how the entire power profile of the system looks, not just the CPU and not just at full power.

If it uses as much or more power when busy and you're just using it to push more frames in a video game, you're probably not going to singlehandedly bring about the next ice age. Same if the low utilization system power is similar and you spend most of the time messing around on the internet or editing code occasionally punctuated by a compile job, even if that does run faster.

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