Hacker News Reader

Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

Perf/watts is a deal breaker when used to "hide" lackluster performance. Intel did this with the 11th and 13th CPU gen and it showed a lot.

I don't think it makes much sense here because the gap is not that large. The B580 consumes more power (let's say about 50W though it seems to be a smaller delta in a lot of cases) than a RTX 4060 but it's also faster and 50$ cheaper.

Even at a fairly high electricity rate of $0.32/kWh, you are looking at 20 hours of play to get 1kWh consumed. That means you need to game a whopping 3125 hours to get to breakeven.

View on HN

B580 consumes quite a bit more when idle though (~35 vs ~10w) which can add up if you keep your PC on a lot of the time. IIRC even the 14900k is less than 20w when idle.

So not great.. but yeah, still would need to run 24x365 to get to $50.

I had missed the idle consumption. That being said I guess if they are that energy conscious the next question would be why aren't they shutting down their computer when not in use.

You shouldn't need to shut down your computer just to have low power consumption when you're not doing much. I just built a home server PC using an AMD Ryzen CPU and the entire machine consumes 24W, measured at the wall, when the hard drives are spun down. That's including the CPU/MB, memory, 4 case fans (at a lower rpm), and 1 NVMe drive, plus the CPU fan, the power supply fan, and all the losses from the power supply itself (power supplies aren't that efficient at idle loads). That's all less power than people here are saying this stupid GPU card consumes at idle (30W). It should not more than double my power consumption just to plug in a GPU card and have it do nothing.

>I just built a home server

People building home servers aren't a big customer base. In other words, you don't really matter to them.

No one's using an Intel ARC graphics card in an enterprise setting. If they don't understand this and are not worried about power consumption, this is just yet another reason Intel is swirling the drain.

Is this specific card really something you would ever use in an enterprise/datacentre setting? It's just not its target market. IIRC Gaudi is almost entirely unrelated to ARC

And even if we're talking about datacenter GPUs power usage should be a relatively much smaller issue than for CPUs because of how expensive they are e.g. depreciation for something like the H100 (assuming it actually starts losing value any time soon...) is more than the power + cooling costs anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com