Discussion New computer parts as an enviromental disaster?

Page 4 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

Kocicak

Golden Member
Jan 17, 2019
1,067
1,124
136
The current broad trend in all technology is moving toward increased efficiency in order to decrease energy consumption, which has various negative effects.

I just saw a rumour that an upcoming Intel CPU will have special performance mode allowing 350W energy draw. It also seems that upcoming AMD CPUs will have higher TDP than the current generation.

What is the sense of this in the point of view of the broad trend I mentioned in the beginning? State regulation in my opinion is sometimes a good thing and at this point it seems that power draw of consumer computers should be limited.

I think that limits of 50W for CPU, 50W for integrated GPU and 150W for discrete GPU would satisfy needs of most people.

Parts with higher power draw could be heavilly taxed so that they would be financially viable only for proffesionals who would use them productively.

I understand that some people may find my idea not beneficial for whatever reasons but what is happening now in this part of PC market is ridiculous and needs to stop.

(and production of virtual currencies should be banned completely as a huge energy waste, but that is a different topic.)
 
Last edited:

Kocicak

Golden Member
Jan 17, 2019
1,067
1,124
136
I am starting to feel that some of the posters here are from USA. Lack of effective state regulation made USA to have extremely poor or nonexistent public transportation systems and railways network, horribly high per capita energy consumption, problematic healthcare system with poor availability for some and overpriced for others, etc, etc, etc.

High per capita energy consumption and also greenhouse gas production is not just an internal problem of the USA, you are screwing things up for everybody on the planet.

USA serves as an example of disastruous impacts of a lack of state regulation and investment in many fields.
 

yottabit

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2008
1,486
514
146
The average electric vehicle requires 30kWh to travel 100 miles. If my PC has a 1000W constant power draw (which most do not) I can run it for 30 hours and use the same amount of energy. Now where is the problem?

To other points you brought up. Most consumer PCs are likely laptops and use less power than what you list. Most business PCs are low end desktop models or laptops that use less power than what you list. The CPU you mention is an enthusiast or professional level processor that the vast majority of people aren't going to buy anyway.

BTW, are you also not the person "got lured from AMD to Intel with a high single thread performance" and are also overclocking your RAM in another thread?

That’s a ridiculous amount of energy though. You think it seems appropriate that blinking some lights on a screen for an hour should take the same amount of energy as driving 3.33 miles?

I’ll agree somewhat to the OP’s premise, but only in the context of the latest gen of CPU and GPU. It would be nice to see some sort of “gentleman’s agreement” like Japan had for their sports cars limiting stock power to 286 bhp.

So maybe everyone could agree that stock should ship at 120-140 W CPU, 275 W GPU or so. And similar to those tuner cars, Intel/AMD are free to day “definitely son’t pull that boost limiter jumper pin”

I think having the stock power limits so high is somewhat a negative for the consumer and environment. I’d be fine even if they want to advertise the PBO performance, but why not ship it in a more reasonable state?

Talking about cases where you can keep 95% of the performance at 70% of the power… that sounds like a factory overclock, not an efficient chip design

EDIT: meant to add that in my hypothetical scenario, HEDT and Server would be exempt of course

I think another great way to approach the power limit would be: two fully loaded desktop PC running off one 120 v 15 A wall socket. But I suppose it is all arbitrary, and as long as they don’t sacrifice idle performance and expose control for undervolting / limiting total power, I won’t complain (too much)
 

Kocicak

Golden Member
Jan 17, 2019
1,067
1,124
136
One way how to look at the efficiency is to observe time and energy used to compute a fixed task.

I found this graph in the Computerbase review:
12900K power source.png

From that I arrived at how much energy is needed to spare one second of the time of completing the task.

12900K power analysis.png

You can see that this CPU is allowed to run so far away from an efficient region so that it consumes up to QUADRUPLE of the energy needed to spare one second!

THIS IS RIDICULOUS AND NEEDS TO STOP !!!
 
  • Like
Reactions: igor_kavinski