PC power limits?

[Lisias]

I found this one today and for some time I didn't knew where to post it. I think this fits this thread, so here we are.

"Dell won't ship energy-hungry PCs to California and five other US states due to power regulations"

https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/dell_energy_pcs/

Frankly, I didn't saw that coming and I don't like the smell of it - not to mention at least some of the mentioned states are pushing electrical vehicles...

[Vanamonde]

This does not appear to be a KSP tutorial, and so it has been moved to its own thread. 

[Spacescifi]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

I found this one today and for some time I didn't knew where to post it. I think this fits this thread, so here we are.

"Dell won't ship energy-hungry PCs to California and five other US states due to power regulations"

https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/dell_energy_pcs/

Frankly, I didn't saw that coming and I don't like the smell of it - not to mention at least some of the mentioned states are pushing electrical vehicles...

You could just engineer your PC to be a power hog anyway.

You need a wrist wrap thing you can buy to ground yourself electromagnetically to manually install stuff on your motherboard without zapping it via static.

Takes more work... possible though.

 

You would be surprised what computers can do with sufficient programs and power.

It's too often misused though.

[Lisias]

6 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

You could just engineer your PC to be a power hog anyway.

Yep. But since most people usually buys a prebuilt PC (or so I was told), this appears to be a big issue.

The computer mentioned on the Article (ALIENWARE AURORA RYZEN™ EDITION R10 GAMING DESKTOP) is not that big, 550W. I think my old PS3 is more of a power hog than it. Even my NAS, that supports 6 5.24" spinning disks, needs a 5A PSU...

I think this will impact somehow the new generation of Games - and I'm not even talking about some issues on the current ones...

[kerbiloid]

28 minutes ago, Lisias said:

I think this will impact somehow the new generation of Games

The devs will be forced to optimize them...

:horror: :horror: :horror: :horror: :horror: :horror: :horror: 
:scream: :scream: :scream: :scream: :scream: :scream: :scream: 

The epoch of "(get) off and buy a better videocard to watch our slideshow" is going to get gone.

The sweet union of videocard manufacturers and game engine developers will get cracked.

[TheSaint]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The sweet union of videocard manufacturers and game engine developers cryptocurrency miners will get cracked.

Fixed it for you. If 10% of the video cards being produced today are actually going to gamers I would be shocked. And, let's be frank, who is chewing up more kWh? A gamer who runs one GPU in his rig for a couple hours after work every night, or a miner who runs hundreds of them 24/7? It sounds to me like another case of politicians trying to regulate things that are smarter than they are.

[kerbiloid]

But the single GPU users will be limited, too.

So, the sweet union is anyway going to dismiss.

[MKI]

Quote

Such concern about energy efficiency appears to be appropriate given the findings of a 2015 Semiconductor Industry Association report [PDF] that, given a benchmark system of 10-14 Joules/per bit transition, "computing will not be sustainable by 2040, when the energy required for computing will exceed the estimated world’s energy production."

 

Quote

At the end of 2016, California became the first state to approve energy efficiency limits for computers. At the time, the California Energy Commission (CEC) voted unanimously to adopt tighter appliance energy standards in an effort to meet climate policy goals. According to the 2016 CEC Staff Report, computers and monitors account for about 3 per cent of residential and 7 per cent of commercial energy use in the state.

Some of these numbers do jump out, not going to lie.

This sorta stuff reminds me of the Clean Air Act of 1970s, and later California (along with other states)  adopting more strict requirements than the federal law, resulting in the entire auto industry just improving their standards to meet the new requirements.

Its not like engineers are backed into a wall and the only thing to do is nerf the performance of everything. Just design a better product, to reach a more strict market. We already are hitting Moore's law in terms of compute, so maybe its time to improve efficiency? 

 

5 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Fixed it for you. If 10% of the video cards being produced today are actually going to gamers I would be shocked. And, let's be frank, who is chewing up more kWh? A gamer who runs one GPU in his rig for a couple hours after work every night, or a miner who runs hundreds of them 24/7? It sounds to me like another case of politicians trying to regulate things that are smarter than they are.

I can't really see how one would easily regulate crypto miners even if you wanted to, other than have extremely high energy prices due to supply/demand making mining less popular, which is already the case for California, and other states that already have stressed power grids. 

 

What's interesting is a place like Oregon is on the list, even though power in such a state is rather cheap, which is why there are significant amounts of "west coast" data centers are located within that state. (Silicon Forest) Along with large scale energy production facilities to power them.

 

**edit** apparently these states still allow dedicated mining rigs just fine. I personally am willing to bet that will change, but not with this legislation. 

Edited July 27, 2021 by MKI

[Nuke]

17 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

You could just engineer your PC to be a power hog anyway.

You need a wrist wrap thing you can buy to ground yourself electromagnetically to manually install stuff on your motherboard without zapping it via static.

Takes more work... possible though.

 

You would be surprised what computers can do with sufficient programs and power.

It's too often misused though.

i think the wrist strap thing is old hat. modern semiconductor devices usually have esd resistant i/o pins. esd hasnt really been a problem since the mid 90s. i remember the tool kits we got in our computer technology class had wrist straps but also had tools to install and remove dip ram, which has been 10 years obsolete by that point, and that was nearly 20 years ago. were talking 486es and older when your cpu cache was in the form of banks of dip chips. 

but yea its easy to waste power. leds, unnecessary water cooling, overclocking, buying a thousand watt supply when you only need half that, running crysis, etc. power supplies in particular have different efficiencies at different loading conditions. the curve usually has an efficiency bucket at some percentage of its rating.  you are better off figuring what your typical power usage is and selecting a supply that is most efficient around that value. this is how oems can get away with lower wattage supplies where most pc builders tend to over spec (which can be really bad for your idle efficiency). its all about doing the right testing and applying the right numbers. and if you build a one off computer every few years like i do, you usually dont bother. you figure out what it should need, overspec by a couple hundred watts and power wastage be damned. 

Edited July 27, 2021 by Nuke

[Shpaget]

Do they still use GPUs? Haven't all serious miners switched to ASICs long ago?

[Nuke]

5 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Fixed it for you. If 10% of the video cards being produced today are actually going to gamers I would be shocked. And, let's be frank, who is chewing up more kWh? A gamer who runs one GPU in his rig for a couple hours after work every night, or a miner who runs hundreds of them 24/7? It sounds to me like another case of politicians trying to regulate things that are smarter than they are.

im not a big fan of over-regulation and the state of california is big on that. but thats getting into politics territory so i will leave it at that.

but i think miners have been somewhat of a scapegoat lately. semiconductor shortages are due to both the pandemic shutting down manufacture while large stimulus payments and a need to work from home have really hiked the demand for computers. but they are not the only thing in short supply. to blame all that on miners is a gross exaggeration at best. ive turned to mining as a means to make my computer hardware, which i do game on, pay for itself. im not a big fan of nvidia gimping the eth hash rate on their next gen of video cards because that screws me over and doesn't do a thing to large scale crypto farms. they will buy dedicated mining cards which still takes a bite out of manufacturing capacity and will inevitably become e-waste. or they may stick with gpus and just buy more of them, however with the intention to sell them pennies on the dollar once they have been replaced with next gen cards. miners do care about efficiency because that directly affects their bottom line. gpu manufacturers are leaving a lot of money on the table by not keeping up with demand. 

23 minutes ago, Shpaget said:

Do they still use GPUs? Haven't all serious miners switched to ASICs long ago?

only for bitcoin. etherium is whats eating gpus. im mining it now.  eth is intended to be asic resistant. the problem with asics is that the manufacturers of same end up becoming the gatekeepers of the currency, which trends it towards centralization. this goes against the spirit of cryptocurrency.

Edited July 27, 2021 by Nuke

[Lisias]

22 hours ago, TheSaint said:

It sounds to me like another case of politicians trying to regulate things that are smarter than they are.

And I will not even talk about the push for Electric Cars - these things are not going to use the very same electricity?

[kerbiloid]

Well, the electric cars will be under 500 W, too.

https://spark.iop.org/why-one-horsepower-more-power-one-horse#gref

Animal	Average Mass (kg)	Approximate force exerted (N)	Average speed (m/s)	Power (W)
Ox	500-900	600-800	0.56-0.83	560
Cow	400-600	500-600	0.70	340
Water buffalo	400-900	500-800	0.8-0.9	560
Horse	400-700	600-800	1.0	750
Mule	350-500	500-600	0.9-1.0	520
Donkey	150-300	300-400	0.70	260
Camel	450-500	400-500	1.1	500
Adult human	60-90	300	0.28	75

 

Isn't a mule enough for a good, thrifty man?

***

Wait... Are they really going to do that?..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Dynamics#BigDog

[Kerbart]

On 7/27/2021 at 1:27 PM, TheSaint said:

Fixed it for you. If 10% of the video cards being produced today are actually going to gamers I would be shocked. And, let's be frank, who is chewing up more kWh? A gamer who runs one GPU in his rig for a couple hours after work every night, or a miner who runs hundreds of them 24/7? It sounds to me like another case of politicians trying to regulate things that are smarter than they are.

Probably. I wonder how many of these power rigs there are. And how many servers google, microsoft and amazon employ that blow these limits completely out of the water, but those will not be regulated.

[kerbiloid]

And what about space?

The mining needs power. Much power. The mucher - the better.
The muchest power in close proximity is next to the Sun.

But at the same time the mining needs cooling.
The greatest coolers in close proximity are Jupiter, Saturn, and their icy moons.

So, the coins should be mined at once next to the Sun and next to a gas giant.

How to solve this problem?

The quantum entanglement.
Make your bits hot and cool at once.

And what can we see irl?
They are going to study the Sun from the shortest distance.
They are going to study Europa and Enceladus ice.
They feverishly develop the quantim computers.

So, they are planning to turn the whole Solar system into the biggest known coin farm.

 

But who are "they"?
The Earth is cptured by ET who implemented the idea of bitcoins and are using the humanity as the farm builders.

***

Upd.

And even more.

While the ancient and medieval serfs were mining stone and silver ore in the quarries.
the industrial serfs were mining coal and iron ore in the mines,
the modern x-coin serfs are mining the x-coins on the servers.

It's even called so. A server- where the serf is serving by mining the x-coins.

And the carbon footprint from the excessive power generation is a logical part of it.
It's what the mining serfs were breathing in every epoch.

Edited July 29, 2021 by kerbiloid

[kerbiloid]

_(multipost)

Edited July 29, 2021 by kerbiloid

[Lisias]

12 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Probably. I wonder how many of these power rigs there are. And how many servers google, microsoft and amazon employ that blow these limits completely out of the water, but those will not be regulated.

Because you regulate voters, not funders.

 

12 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

While the ancient and medieval serfs were mining stone and silver ore in the quarries.
the industrial serfs were mining coal and iron ore in the mines,
the modern x-coin serfs are mining the x-coins on the servers.

And the new feudal lords are the Energy producers apparently.

[Nuke]

i did some math (though with poor measurements and a lot of ballpark estimates, its really hard to call it such) to figure out how much mining it would take to be able to live on it alone. i would only need like an 8-10 x increase in available hardware to make minimum wage. im currently using  about 200-300w (estimated, dont have any mains watt meters on hand). going up to 3kw. this would cost roughly a buck an hour at current electric rates. this is less than a one hour commute to work in a modest car. in fact i could make 2-3x minimum wage before my energy usage is more than the commute alone. ignoring the kind of wastages that companies tend to be known for.  and a good portion of that money would go into keeping the hardware up to date. might be a stretch when you factor in the environmental cost of manufacturing and shipping the hardware, but i think its better for the environment that i stay home and mine.