[ale] Saving electricity with Linux

[Jim Kinney]

So far the giant cloud systems and super computers run Linux. And those
monsters suck down power like it free. In fact, that's why datacenters get
built where they do - cheaper power.

In terms of efficiency, think FLOPS/Watt, the compute style matters. Is it
raw number crunching or IO heavy? Those GPUs are very amperage hungry but
flops/watt are more efficient than a general purpose cpu. AMD still
outpaces Intel in the cpu flops/watt race.

I don't see Microsoft servers being the beast behind the datacenter power
hogs. I do see almost all aspects of datacenter power, cooling, and access
management being run by microsoft servers. But that's 4-5 servers in a
datacenter.

Linux won. I got that car tag a long time ago.

LINUX1



On Fri, May 31, 2024, 1:07 PM Solomon Peachy via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> On Fri, May 31, 2024 at 12:43:39PM -0400, Bob Toxen via Ale wrote:
> > Datacenters may use as much as 9% of total U.S. electricity in six years.
> > Home computers use some too.
> >
> > Since Linux uses roughly half the electricity as Windows, switching to
> Linux in the
> > data centers will save a lot of electricity.  Get the treehuggers to
> champion this.
>
> The overwhelming majority of the systems in datacenters are already
> running Linux.  So what you're saying is that, Linux is, by
> itself, responsible for nearly 9% of total US electrical consumption. [1]
>
> ...And I should point out that if you put Linux vs Windows on modern
> laptop harwdare, the odds are high that Windows actually uses less, both
> when on-but-otherwise-idle and in a suspended state.
>
> (This is even more true when comparing Linux vs MacOS on Apple hardware)
>
> [1] Excluding cooling, which can be up to half of that energy usage..
>
>  - Solomon
> --
> Solomon Peachy                        pizza at shaftnet dot org
> (email&xmpp)
>                                       @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
> Dowling Park, FL                      speachy (libera.chat)
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