Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Thomas Koenig Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: lots of juice, Short Vectors Versus Long Vectors Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 11:48:03 -0000 (UTC) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 33 Message-ID: References: <4lnk2jdiligpupetq3cncs2j41mdcpd7l1@4ax.com> Injection-Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 13:48:03 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="4d0d5e931b27d0621db2daf0dd9fec39"; logging-data="377190"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+kF9BKEBv5dw7+x22E2QlxXnQbhpNuxXo=" User-Agent: slrn/1.0.3 (Linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:vMBXiRZCetKJMukclYFiR2+1Vrk= Bytes: 2463 John Levine schrieb: > According to Thomas Koenig : >>> https://www.infoworld.com/article/2627720/gpus-boost-energy-efficiency-in-supercomputers.html >> >>Compared the late 1950s, was the total energy consumption by >>computers higher or lower than today? :-) > > Well, compared to what? Absolute figures, or relative :-) > > In 1960 the total power generated in the US was about 750 TWh. In > recent years it's over 4000 TWh. My point was: Computers have become vastly more energy-efficient and powerful. I think one of the "What If 2" chapters is about building an Iphone out of vaccum tubes, which would end badly. This has led _much_ more widespread adoption of computers plus derivatives such as smartphones or tablets, which means that their overall energy consumption has increased by many orders of magnitude over the 1950s, when just a few vaccum-tube based computers were in operation. If people make the claim that GPUs are more power-efficient than CPUs, yes, they are for equal performance (if they can be programmed efficiently enough for the application at hand). In practice, this will not be used for energy savings, but for doing more calculations. Same thing happend with steam engines - Watt's engines were a huge improvement in fuel efficiency over the previous Newcomen models, which led to much more steam engines being built.