[peoplefromibiza]

> Economically and environmentally it's absolutely a problem.

[citation needed]

Economically the Intel CPU of the 90s that had a very bad perf/watt compared to today's standards have been awesomely worth it

Environmentally, CPU have been getting better and better, the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your very strong claim.

[daneel_w]

Citation needed? Do you live in some alternate reality?

> "... the difference of a few 10s of watts doesn't really make any difference, unless you have numbers to back up your very strong claim."

We have a billion power-hungry PCs running on the planet. Power-efficiency matters for economy and for environment, because power isn't free and only a tiny speck of the world runs on clean energy. It always mattered.

[peoplefromibiza]

> We have a billion power-hungry PCs running

Let's do some math.

According to [1] Human production of energy is even lower at an estimated 160,000 TW-hr for all of year 2019 (a COVID year)

Let's hypothesize the difference is on average 10watt/hour (rather large for the average device), the difference for a billion devices would be 10GW/hour.

Which is exactly 1/16,000,000th of the total.

Assuming every Apple computer consumes 100watts less than the equivalent non Apple, assuming there are 20 million new low power Apple computers (probably there are much less), assuming the CPU are 100% of the time in sustained mode (of course on average CPU do not run at 100% of the power all the time continuously, but let's assume they all do in this example) it would mean 2GW/hour saved, which corresponds to a 1/80,000,000th of the total.

It would allow, maybe, to shutdown an average power plant (the largest one produces 23GW/hour)

Unfortunately there are over 65,000 power plants in the World, 2,500 of which run on coal.

Unfortunately the energy saved could come from renewables, so the difference on emissions would be even less relevant than it already is.

Economically those 2GW even at the Denmark prices ($0.50/KW) would cost one million dollars (2GW = 2,000,000KW). AKA nothing.

As you can see the difference must be quite large to make a real measurable difference.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget

[locustous]

Most of those systems sit at idle, when they are on at all. Idle power is not the same as TDP. The idle difference is not so great that it's a big deal.

[MBCook]

Do you have a source showing idle numbers? I’ve never seen a comparison. The ones I’ve seen are always about max power.

[locustous]

It's not apples vs apples. Literally and figuratively. The I/O or board features on PC boards will eat power. So you will end up with a 15-30 W idle vs probably 5-8 for the Mac. I doubt the PCIe on the pro does much to the power unless there is an extra I/O die on system, you need active chips to eat power. That is vs Intel.

AMD will add a bunch more watts to the idle number as their multi CCX CPUs just eat more power at idle. You'll be closer to 30-45 W idle. This is a guess, it's widely acknowledged but not really quantified that I've found.

AMD monolithic dies are more in line with Intel. IE the laptop/mini PC line will be nice and low.

The difference is vastly diminished when you add the display that's using 80 Ws. So that's 85 vs 100 W total system power? 15% difference that gets bigger when you peg your processor.

Apple numbers are better in pretty much every way on power. But we're talking a handful of watts. Even at really high power rates it isn't going to add to up much.

Sources: I have a Mac mini and an Intel raptor lake desktop. I take measurements. And I have read various sources. This is my best information.

[daneel_w]

Whataboutism.

[tester756]

Yea, sure you can argue for the sake of arguing

but yea it makes difference if the difference is

0.001% 0.01% 0.1% 1% 10% 1000%