[ToValueFunfetti]

This is a plainly dishonest comparison. A single H200 does not need to run continuously for you to generate a dozen pictures. And then you immediately pivot to comparing the paint usage against "the grand scheme of things"- 700W is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

[bayindirh]

In fact it's pretty fair.

Many people think that when a piece of hardware is idle, its power consumption becomes irrelevant, and that's true for home appliances and personal computers.

However, the picture is pretty different for datacenter hardware.

Looking now, an idle V100 (I don't have an idle H200 at hand) uses 40 watts, at minimum. That's more than TDP of many, modern consumer laptops and systems. A MacBook Air uses 35W power supply to charge itself, and it charges pretty quickly even if it's under relatively high stress.

I want to clarify some more things. A modern GPU server houses 4-8 high end GPUs. This means 3KW to 5KW of maximum energy consumption per server. A single rack goes well around 75KW-100KW, and you house hundreds of these racks. So, we're talking about megawatts of energy consumption. CERN's main power line on the Swiss side had a capacity around 10MW, to put things in perspective.

Let's assume an H200 uses 60W energy when it's idle. This means ~500W of wasted energy per server for sitting around. If a complete rack is idle, it's 10KW. So you're wasting energy consumption of 3-5 houses just by sitting and doing nothing.

This computation only thinks about the GPU. Server hardware also adds around 40% to these numbers. Go figure. This is wasting a lot for cat pictures.

And, these "small" numbers add up to a lot.

[lxgr]

Definitely worth considering in a world in which there are any H200s idling in data centers.

[bayindirh]

Now that's one fine No True Scotsman.

    A: GPUs use a lot of power!
    B: Not all of them are running 100% continuously, eh?,
    A: They waste too much power when they're idle, too!
    C: None of the H200s are sitting idle, you knob!

I mean, they are either wasting energy sitting idle or doing barely useful work. I don't know what to say anymore.

We'll cook ourselves, anyway. Why bother? Enjoy the sauna. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ToValueFunfetti]

B is supposed to be me? I said the H200 doesn't need to be running continuously to generate a dozen images. If a million people generate a dozen images, it no longer makes sense to compare to the costs of a single artist for 6 hours. I really don't understand why this is hard and that makes this feel very uncharitable.

[lxgr]

I'm not saying that this isn't "true idling", I'm saying that idling H200s simply don't exist, i.e., I disagree with B. Do you, A, even disagree?

> they are either wasting energy sitting idle or doing barely useful work

Now here's a true (inverse) scotsman, or more accurately, a moved goalpost: Work on things you don't deem valuable is basically the same thing as idling?

> We'll cook ourselves, anyway. Why bother? Enjoy the sauna. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm very concerned about that too, but I don't think we'll avoid the sauna with fatalism or logically unsound appeals to morality about resource consumption.