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Comment by Luker88 | Hacker News Reader

Some people appreciate leaving the pc open for light tasks even at night, and wasting too much power doing nothing is... well, wasteful. Imagine a home server that has the GPU for AI or multimedia stuff.

The same architecture will also be used in mobile, so depending on where this comes from (architecturally) it could mean more power savings there, too.

Besides, lower power also means lower cooling/noise on idle, and shorter cooldown times after a burst of work.

And since AMD is slowly going to the (ever next-time) unified architecture, any gains there will also mean less idle power draw in other environments, like servers.

Nothing groundbreaking, sure, but I won't say no to all of that.

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> Imagine a home server that has the GPU for AI or multimedia stuff.

I imagine you wouldn't attach a display to your home server. Would the display engine draw any power in that case?

Is a PiKVM considered a display? I've got one attached to my home server. Alongside the dedicated graphics card, it probably uses more power than usual server motherboard KVMs, but it's still cheaper and accessible for home servers.

For the past decade my home server is also my desktop workstation. According to canon people shouldn't do this because the workstation might crash or be updated more frequently or create conflicting resource usage, but with containers it's never been a problem for me and lets me have one more capable computer (with dGPU) essentially for each purpose, rather than managing two systems, one of which I only use for ~20 hours a week (I usually use my laptop). However I definitely would like it to use as little power when in low processing states.

i attached a "virtual display" to my windows VM box, to do game streaming

They have optimized idle performance for when the display is still on. Which is nice, but configuring the screen to switch off when idle will save far more power.

You're confusing idle (the user is not present) with idle (the screen contents is not changing). The latter is extremely common when someone is e.g. reading a document. Nothing changes for a minute or two, the user scrolls down and in an instant the contents changes, then nothing changes for a minute or two again.

You don't want the hardware in a high-power state during the time it's not doing anything, even when the user is actively looking at the screen.

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