Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones
by jeffbee on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @02:21PM
(#32841114)
Datacenter energy usage is irrelevant to our global situation. A large cloud datacenter uses a similar amount of power as 1 large aircraft. All U.S. datacenters combined consumed about 1% of U.S. electric power, meaning they constitute much less than 1% of all energy demand. And despite the fact that cloud capacity has exploded in the last 10 years, electric power consumption of datacenters has barely increased, because the cloud is so dramatically more efficient than other datacenters.
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Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones
by AtlasBarfed on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @02:31PM
(#32841276)
source? Bitcoin network allegedly uses as much electricity as Argentina based on headlines (and... those are headlines). Yes that's global, but still.
Re:Carbon footprint of unwanted data use by smartphones
by ElevenLathe on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @03:22PM
(#32842021)
I'm not sure of the source (as I'm not the parent), but I wouldn't classify crypto farms as "datacenters". They have very low needs in terms of bandwidth and reliability. Many of them are barns on consumer ISP connections filled with bare mobos sitting on pieces of cardboard, or other similar arrangements that are presumably OK given the economics of crypto, but wouldn't be sellable even as cloud compute for most purposes in the current market (it might be OK for batch-type stuff that doesn't involve tons of transfer -- some kinds of scientific workloads like Folding@Home maybe?).