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by wongarsu 226 days ago
If every computer built in the last decade gets 1% faster and all we have to pay for that is a bit of one-off engineering effort and a doubling of the storage requirement of the ubuntu mirrors that seems like a huge win

If you aren't convinced by your ubuntu being 1% faster, consider how many servers, VMs and containers run ubuntu. Millions of servers using a fraction of a percent less energy multiplies out to a lot of energy
4 comments
vladms 226 days ago
Don't have a clear opinion, but you have to factor in all the issues that can be due to different versions of software. Think of unexposed bugs in the whole stack (that can include compiler bugs but also software bugs related to numerical computation or just uninitialized memory). There are enough heisenbugs without worrying that half the servers run on a slightly different software.

It's not for nothing that some time ago "write once, run everywhere" was a selling proposition (not that it was actually working in all cases, but definitely working better than alternatives).

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sumtechguy 226 days ago
That comes out to about 1.5 hours faster per week for many tasks. If you are running full tilt. But that seems like an ok easy win.
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alkonaut 225 days ago
If I recompile a program to fully utilize my cpu better (use AVX or whatever) then if my program takes 1 second to execute instead of 2, it likely did not use half the _energy_.
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darkwater 225 days ago
Obviously not. But scale it out to a fleet of 1000 servers running your program continuously, you can now shut down 10 for the same exact workload.
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zymhan 224 days ago
Sure, but we're talking about compiled packages being distributed by a package manager.
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alkonaut 224 days ago
Yes but my point is: if I download the AVX version instead of the SSE version of a package and that makes my 1000 servers 10% _quicker_ that is not the same as being 10% more _efficient_.

Because typically these modern things are a way of making the CPU do things faster by eating more power. There may be savings from having fewer servers etc, but savings in _speed_ are not the same as savings in _power_ (and some times even work the opposite way)

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duskdozer 225 days ago
how much energy would we save if every website request weren't loaded down with 20MB of ads and analytics :(
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