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Comment by craftkiller | Hacker News Reader

That headless quad-core intel mini PC uses more energy sitting idle than my entire 8C/16T AMD framework laptop sitting idle, including powering the display.

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I find that very hard to believe considering the N100 has a TDP of 6W and in benchmarks draws <8W when idle. Ryzen 5 7640U's numbers are 5x that. The laptop's display itself will consume more energy than the entire mini PC on idle.

From powertop sitting idle running sway, waybar, and alacritty:

> The battery reports a discharge rate of 6.34 W

Plenty of people have hit even lower levels, and there are plenty of reports of people getting approximately the same as me: https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-ppd-v-tlp-for-amd-ry...

The Intel PC in the article is listed as 7-10W idle, which puts my full laptop below its lowest bound.

One of the comments on the article's page:

> I managed to get my N100 mini pc to 1.3-1.5W idle power consumption at wall

There's a lot of variables at play with idle power consumption, so the devil is in the details with what is actually being compared.

Plus the manufacturer published TDP numbers are with a baseline load, not 100% idle and as optimized as possible (because at that point you might as well turn the device off).

If I'm reading this correctly, I think the article is citing 'typical' (i.e. what other people said) idle power consumption measured at the wall for similar N100 PCs.

TDP something different: it is typically a term to describe the amount of heat that needs to be dissipated from a chip while under load. While it is a number that is closely related to the power consumption, it is neither the same thing, nor would those numbers ever cite the total consumption of the system. (because, for instance, most components in a computer are passively cooled)

At full power running 24/7 (12V*3A) at 10cents/kwh, the mini PC uses $36 of electricity. Who cares how much power it uses.

Here in Germany it is more like 40cents/kwh so that is some serious money down the drain for some people.

There isn’t anywhere in the US that has 10cents/kwh residential power either (though there are a few places that are close): https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

And perhaps we shouldn't just blindly waste energy just because it happens to be cheap.

I think worrying about a few dollars when the performance difference is 2x at minimum is dumb.

It depends on your use-case. If I was making a file server then idle power consumption is all that matters because both of these machines will saturate a gigabit ethernet link[0] and a home file server is going to be idle 90+% of the time. If I was making a build server instead then I'd actually be using the additional CPU capacity.

[0] actually I wouldn't use either of these machines for a file server due to the lack of ECC, but you get the point.

PG&E in California is 4-6x+. I care.

https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...

A desktop system doesn't need to optimize idle power. So I'm willing to bet none of the components (cough intel) was picked for their low idle power consumption. :)

isn't that expected? or do you mean "I'd buy a minipc designed like a laptop"?

If I wanted another minipc, I'd be looking for one designed like a laptop. The vast majority of consumer computers spend most of their time idle, even when it is something we are directly interacting with at the time (like laptops). In my experience, this is even more true for minipcs. I'm wondering what magic has gone into laptops and hasn't made it into electron guzzlers like the intel minipc in this article.

How are you measuring that?

Running powertop on battery while sitting idle running sway, waybar, and alacritty with my "brightness" setting set to 85/255 but my amdgpu.abmlevel is set to 3 which reduced the "actual_brightness" to ~27/255

PowerTOP estimates your power consumption, it does not actually measure it. Also, this neglects AC/DC power conversion loss. For a more accurate apples-to-apples comparison, disconnect the battery and use an actual power meter (e.g. Kill-a-watt) at the AC adapter.

powertop is just relaying whatever value my laptop's battery is reporting for current+voltage, read from sysfs[0]. Are you suggesting my laptop's battery is merely estimating current and/or voltage? I don't know much about the hardware in my laptop's battery, and I'm not succeeding in finding information online, but I'm going to need a source to believe that considering how trivial it would be for the battery to report real values for current and voltage.

Regardless, your point about AC/DC conversion losses is good considering the article almost certainly was measuring from AC seeing as how it doesn't have a battery.

[0] https://github.com/fenrus75/powertop/blob/master/src/measure...

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