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haxxiy on 20 August 2020
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vivster said:
haxxiy said:

I'm legit buying a new case because I don't think mine will be able to cope with the heat output from the new GPUs.

I know that'll probably be an unpopular opinion but PC components should be subject to the same power saving laws that lamps, air conditioners etc. have faced in the last few decades. People were consuming more power than whole countries to mine bitcoins a while back for God's sake. The idea that a single chip would need 250 - 400 watts to function no longer fits today's zeitgeist.

Not sure what or how you would want to achieve regulating efficiency in computer components. Let's ignore for a moment that those components are already as efficient as possible out of sheer necessity, what would the end goal look like?

Do you want to restrict performance for regular consumers? What about professionals that need the performance? Would they need a license or would they just have to live with stunted hardware? Would you ban overclocking? What counts as overclocking? Set a maximum voltage?

Regulations are usually meant for widespread devices that are used a lot, which does not fit high end PC hardware. If you think about it there isn't a point in restricting power draw for enthusiast electronics because they're just that. Think about what other things people use for their hobbies that would have to be regulated.

The vast majority of high end PC components are on servers, cryptocurrency farms, and supercomputers these days. And none of these components are as remotely as efficient as mobile hardware. Intel, IBM, and AMD have all released hardware pushing power consumption to the absolute limit to have a small edge many times before, and they'll admit as much. You see it everytime there's a die shrink. Do they keep to the same clocks and reap the benefits of extra density alone? Nope. They'll push it even when it means the chips are reaching levels of power per area comparable to nuclear reactors or the surface of the sun.

Another of the consequences was that designers etc. all had to come up with more clever and more sophisticated cooling solutions in the space that will host said hardware, which in turn consume even more power. That is just not sustainable or desirable. And if the people consuming megawatts to mine bitcoins happen to use the same hardware the average bloke will buy to play Rocket League... that's just an unfortunate side casualty. You can't regulate one but not the other when the basic components are the same.

Since power consumption increases quadratically related to the voltage and that increases nearly linearly around the frequencies chips work, it's not unfeasible that a 10% decrease in clocks could decrease power consumption by close to 20% already. So no one is going to be "stunted" with reasonable regulations.

Last edited by haxxiy - on 20 August 2020