thinking about how much compute is just lying on the table because gamers have a lot of time they aren't playing games where their processor and graphics cards are just idling at absurd wattages compared to laptops that can do those tasks

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thinking about how much compute is just lying on the table because gamers have a lot of time they aren't playing games where their processor and graphics cards are just idling at absurd wattages compared to laptops that can do those tasks
Personally I'm actually a little more offended by projects that use a Raspberry Pi to blink on an LED when a sensor reads high. That doesn't even take processing power if done well, and you put a whole Linux computer on the job?
i hate to break it to you about most consumer electronics. does my bluetooth enabled air frier really need an unauthenticated busybox shell?
Yeah. But gaming PCs for the last decade or so are really good at "race to idle" and power gating and such so it's not like they're using more power than a laptop on basic tasks anyway. The only exception is RAM I suppose, desktop RAM both often comes in larger quantities and hasn't benefited nearly as much from the efficiency advances of mobile. Not that RAM is that much of a power hog to begin with though.
my desktop cpu idles at like 50W according to AMD and my laptop at 2?
Actually that's fascinating, I had no idea modern desktop CPUs had slipped so badly. I have an old Ivy Bridge gaming system that can idle at ~30W and I simply assumed that would continue to advance. Looks like someone took a sibling chip and got it down to 6W at idle, but says 11W was the number without tuning when he just picked power efficient components for the rest of the system. Makes sense, that list looks surprisingly similar to mine.
yeah it's pretty grim where things have gotten with idling, Intel is a bit ahead with swapping to the efficiency cores unless under high load these days I think, my ryzen 7 5800x is very spiky even when it should be idling. I should check out the kill-a-watt from the library again and see what this desktop actually draws between the GPU and the CPU
i kinda miss when things like folding@home were popular specifically for this, so cpu cycles weren't going to waste. i feel like we oughta be building something like that into OSes, so like, if your computer is just sitting idle and you're not running a task, you're donating CPU time to something important.
the big reason stuff like F@H went away is people eventually realized they were just donating their power bill to the project