@Linus Power Consumption, and why it is not irrelevant.

[stevena184]

>_> UK power is soo expensive

Indeed, when I lived with parents, I left everything running constantly, now I live on my own, it's so expensive! I use my laptop mainly now for work and stuff, looking at rebuilding my PC into a desk for work, but right now I don't even use it! I think I pay something like 18p per KW/h but then there are other charges like meter rental and shit, it's not cheap! 

Our government just want wind power too which is over 2 times the cost to run and we are paying for it!

[stevena184]

In Ireland we pay 21 euro-cents/KWh (28 canadian-cents/KWh)

 

Electricity isn't cheap here in Europe. Hopefully the wind power plan here will bring costs down where I live.

Don't count on wind power cutting costs... it's twice as expensive from what I've found out!

[zip2k4]

30Mbps down at peak, sometimes it gets throttled to 20, 1Mbps up so not to bad

 

considering u're in melbourne with that speed, i wanna say lucky u

[rainbrodash666]

30Mbps down at peak, sometimes it gets throttled to 20, 1Mbps up so not to bad

that's pretty good, I have to pay for 35 down 5 up.

[KaareKanin]

Back on topic, from what I gather, what Linus was talking about was that the processors use such small ammounts of power (during normal use) that if you were to further reduce its consumption, you wouldn't notice, because other parts of the system draws so much more power anyways

Canada has also invented the worlds safest nuclear reaction

Did you mean reaction or reactor? :-p

[Blade of Grass]

Back on topic, from what I gather, what Linus was talking about was that the processors use such small ammounts of power (during normal use) that if you were to further reduce its consumption, you wouldn't notice, because other parts of the system draws so much more power anyways

Did you mean reaction or reactor? :-p

shutap

[ultimatemythbuster]

In North America, we leave everything one 24/7/365 because we don't care about power usage.  I leave my computer on all the time unless I have to do updates, but then it gets started right back up again.  

[JLCitadel]

I don't pay bills so I plead ignorance! This is an interesting point you raise, I suppose the reasoning behind it is most people don't take into account these minor details, or atleast don't look for it as a main point in searching for a cpu, and when it's not a prerecorded session it's hard to think of the minority when it's hardly a key point, like wooh.. 10% less power consumption, I save 50$ a year.. That's a reaction I have which is sort of similar to Linus' where as a lot of people like you will feel differently.

[Jumper118]

May want to edit that.

I was using my blackberry PlayBook and so it's a bit slow and misses most for the key strokes. . It's a pile of junk, don't get one.

[LinusTech]

Hello Linus

 

I've just finished watching the latest WAN show, and just like the earlier episodes intels breakthroughs in the field of powerconsumption just got waved aside, as if it was totally irrelevant.

 

If you haven't known yet: You have an international audience. There are people living outside of water-fall-canada and sunshine-arabia where energy, especially electricity, cost a fortune. Just to give you an idea, in Germany the prices for electricity have doubled since the year 2000, currently hanging around an average of 27 euro-cent / KWh which is around 40cents USD/KWh, which is like 500% of your cost of electricity (May be wrong, just did a quick googling).

 

Years ago most everyone let computers run for hours, because electricity was affordable. NOW i know noone anymore who lets their computers run. I myself turn my computer on and off severell times a day because my idle-power demand is quite high. When all i do is browsing the interwebs i mainly use my phone/tablet, because they need a 'metric butt ton' less power. I've been decreasing my used KWh the last 3 years significantly, but still my electricity bill is just stagnating/increasing slowly.

 

I can understand if you just what to ignore that, since it isn't effecting you, but there are also positive things being triggered because of that. Battery-life-time mainly raised by developing less power-consumptiv components, not that much by build better batteries. And who doesnt want a Laptop or a phone the last at least a (work)day?

 

So please Linus, If you haven't got anything good to say about, just dont comment about that at all. You have way too much influence your viewers opinions, to just blow that off.

 

Thanks for everyone who kept reading so far.

 

Happy Threadbashing...

 

kind regards

 

a non canadian

 

This is a good point. Power consumption IS a very important thing, but from a performance enthusiast standpoint (I want more performance) I don't care. If I wanted a power efficient system, I would buy a power efficient SKU. I'm as excited as anyone about Intel's S SKUs that offer pretty good performance with very low power consumption. It's like... being excited about a new Civic hybrid or something because I can save on gas. I'm excited about NUC because of the phenomenal form factors that Intel's power efficiency enables. Awesome stuff!

 

What I'm not excited about is a Hummer with no extra passenger space, no extra towing capacity, a top speed that's exactly the same as the last one, and slightly better fuel economy. I'M BUYING A HUMMER. If I cared about fuel economy I would choose something else and it's fantastic that those options exist, but that's not what I want for a beastly gaming rig or video editing workstation.

[_ASSASSIN_]

This is a good point. Power consumption IS a very important thing, but from a performance enthusiast standpoint (I want more performance) I don't care. If I wanted a power efficient system, I would buy a power efficient SKU. I'm as excited as anyone about Intel's S SKUs that offer pretty good performance with very low power consumption. It's like... being excited about a new Civic hybrid or something because I can save on gas. I'm excited about NUC because of the phenomenal form factors that Intel's power efficiency enables. Awesome stuff!

 

What I'm not excited about is a Hummer with no extra passenger space, no extra towing capacity, a top speed that's exactly the same as the last one, and slightly better fuel economy. I'M BUYING A HUMMER. If I cared about fuel economy I would choose something else and it's fantastic that those options exist, but that's not what I want for a beastly gaming rig or video editing workstation.

agreed, if power consuption was a concern, you wouldn't buy a high end CPU with overclocking capabilities if you know you eventually have to change the voltage to have a reliable CPU ratio

[wpirobotbuilder]

Hello Linus

 

I've just finished watching the latest WAN show, and just like the earlier episodes intels breakthroughs in the field of powerconsumption just got waved aside, as if it was totally irrelevant.

 

If you haven't known yet: You have an international audience. There are people living outside of water-fall-canada and sunshine-arabia where energy, especially electricity, cost a fortune. Just to give you an idea, in Germany the prices for electricity have doubled since the year 2000, currently hanging around an average of 27 euro-cent / KWh which is around 40cents USD/KWh, which is like 500% of your cost of electricity (May be wrong, just did a quick googling).

 

Years ago most everyone let computers run for hours, because electricity was affordable. NOW i know noone anymore who lets their computers run. I myself turn my computer on and off severell times a day because my idle-power demand is quite high. When all i do is browsing the interwebs i mainly use my phone/tablet, because they need a 'metric butt ton' less power. I've been decreasing my used KWh the last 3 years significantly, but still my electricity bill is just stagnating/increasing slowly.

 

I can understand if you just what to ignore that, since it isn't effecting you, but there are also positive things being triggered because of that. Battery-life-time mainly raised by developing less power-consumptiv components, not that much by build better batteries. And who doesnt want a Laptop or a phone the last at least a (work)day?

 

So please Linus, If you haven't got anything good to say about, just dont comment about that at all. You have way too much influence your viewers opinions, to just blow that off.

 

Thanks for everyone who kept reading so far.

 

Happy Threadbashing...

 

kind regards

 

a non Canadian

 

I think a fair point is that, over the last decade or so, chip power across all performance ranges has stayed pretty much the same while performance has increased dramatically. I can buy a Pentium processor now which consumes around 30W of power and outperforms my 95W Core 2 Quad. That is excellent. Modern chips that consume around 70W outperform the 130W Pentiums from the 775 days. 

 

 

Even the enthusiasts are happy about this increase in efficiency. If performance per watt had stayed the same, modern chips would be consuming many hundreds of watts of power, and nobody would be buying them.

[looizhihao]

Me here in Malaysia, paying 0.40MYR/0.12USD per kwh.

[Nexus]

I dont really care about power consumption. I live in the UK and contribute towards the bills before anyone mentions it.

 

I do think that we should be striving towards more energy efficient machines though (for environmental reasons) but not not at the cost of tiny performance jumps per generation.

[luk9400]

I pay in Poland 0,57 PLN (~ 0,18 USD) for kWh so it's not so bad.

[Coltaine]

In Norway I think the electricity price on average throughout the year is something like, 0.05 USD kWh. I think I pay something like 67 USD for electricity consumption over 3 months, but I have to pay something like 170 USD for the grid rent(or network charges or something like that).

[Arun46682]

it doesn't matter to me if power consumption is high unless its making my System Full time Volcano (As in TDP of Hardware).

[Stephie_Girl]

It's actually not bad.  We pay like $0.14 per kilowatt hour.  That translates for me to about $0.30/day to run my computer so like $9/month

[Arinaz]

Reading this makes me want to save energy by actually turning off my pc every day but that won't happen soon.

[silberdrachi]

Yes this is true to a large degree. The latest report I can find is from 2010, so the figures have likely changed a little since then (Mostly Nuclear going up, as they've been refurbishing and restarting some of the old CANDU reactors at the Bruce site):

Hydroelectric: 63.7%

Nuclear: 15%

Coal: 13.1%

Natural Gas: 6.2%

Wind: 0.6%

fuel oil: 0.5%

wood: 0.4%

other (such as petroleum coke): 0.5%

 

With that in mind, it can vary wildly per province. Quebec and BC for example are almost entirely Hydro driven, whereas Ontario having nearly 60% of their generation being done by Nuclear (82,000 Gigawatt-hours out of the total 141,000 GW-h produced by the province).

 

All things considered, even with the few heavy fossil fuel provinces, Canada is still predominantly "Eco-friendly". Say what you will about Nuclear, but it's very reliable and we've never had a nuclear disaster on a live power plant (just ignore the 50's where everyone was doing heavy R&D for the defence department and the US). Oh, and we don't really get earthquakes or tsunami's either

 

Just wondering, but what do you pay in power then? I think i calculated mine to be about .11 usd/kwh and i know Michigan isn't that great on using eco friendly or cheap sources in general.

 

Edit: 0.121861 per KWH total stupid DTE and their "Delivery fees"

[s0nrise]

Electricity is not cheap at all here, we dont use a lot of it in my house, but still pay around $300 a month for it.

I dont really care about power consumption when buying PC parts though, and my pc runs almost 24/7.

Imo its totally irrelevant for desktops, on the other side, its really important for mobile devices.

 

I dont really care about power consumption. I live in the UK and contribute towards the bills before anyone mentions it.

 

I do think that we should be striving towards more energy efficient machines though (for environmental reasons) but not not at the cost of tiny performance jumps per generation.

 

Agree 100% with this guy, I would rather have power hungry but more powerful chips over what Intel is currently doing.

Thats why I'm still running my 2600k  @4.6ghz and not tempted to upgrade it

[Stefken89]

So please Linus, If you haven't got anything good to say about, just dont comment about that at all.

 

 

I agree about how power consumption is a concern. but one paragraph really irks me.

can't say I agree with that. regardless of your influence someone should be allowed to say something negative or dismissive about a item/action etc.

 

I don't know when or what video, but I remember Linus specificaly saying something like: "I realise that this is only irrelevant to me, because we basically have free power with all the water that we've got falling down from everywhere." so he did indirectly say that for some people Haswell may be a big improvement, being much lower power.

Also, he did mention a lot of times that Haswell will be a big thing for laptops/Ultrabooks.

Everyone can agree that Haswell is not really performance-improving. We watch Linus to hear his opinion on things right? Well that is his opinion: Much lower power, which is pretty much irrelevant for a desktop for him, but good for laptops, but no performance improvement :-(.

[CocaholicApe]

Personally, I'm excited about lower power consumption. If not for electric bills (though that is a concern) then at least for lower heat output.

[marsniper27]

I can not complain about our power rates here in New Brunsiwck. our power is subsidized by the goverment so while it costs NB Power $0.15/KWh to produce we only pay $0.09/KWh.

Our electric bills are still high due to the use of electric baseboards for heating that was basically forced into the norm leading to high winter heating costs on our -30C winter days.

[Ziron4]

Here in denmark we pay 45cent pr. KWH so yea FML