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From: Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: lots of juice, Short Vectors Versus Long Vectors
Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 11:48:03 -0000 (UTC)
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John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> schrieb:
> According to Thomas Koenig  <tkoenig@netcologne.de>:
>>> 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.