https://hbr.org/2001/03/harnessing-the-power-of-idle-compute...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed.net
For a while I was in charge of the EFF Cooperating Computing Award. When it was announced, the announcement said
> However, the computer industry produces millions of new computers each year, which sit idle much of the time, running screen savers or waiting for the user to do something. EFF is encouraging people to pool their computing power over the Internet, to work together to share this massive resource.
That was in the 1990s. :-)
It's funny to think of just how inaccurate this became for subsequent CPU and chipset architecture, I guess because of convergent trends in customers wanting to save power for ecological, financial, and mobile device battery life reasons.
You are right. My previous computer was AMD Athlon, and even it near halved consumption when idle.
Modern machines extremely power saving, because desktop CPUs shared many features from Notebook platforms (for example speed step frequency change), and I see more than 6x difference of consumption of whole machine, even when I myself too conservative to use sleep/idle modes, because some programs don't behave adequate in such environment.
Sure. Even for the on-demand stuff they have a vested interest in reducing power consumption as much as they can.
They charge the customers a flat rate per hour, so every joule they can cut out is money in their pocket.
It would be different if they were charging the customers by the kwH or something.
A modern datacenter serving some consumer facing service likely sees a big difference in cpu usage and thus power usage between peak and off peak.
Otoh, if it's doing non-interactive data processing, it could be near 100% capacity consistently.
Personally, I'm guessing AWS has a noticable peak and trough on power. But if it makes sense, they do have the spot market which could be used to attract or repel load in order to hit a consumption target.