On 02.11.2016 08:59, Edward O'Callaghan wrote:
This maybe somewhat of a striking topic however it is one that has not
really had enough attention, I feel, in a way that warrants the gravity
of if ramifications. Thus, I really would like to kick this discussion
into hopefully something serious and creditable that we can all think
about. Also, please excuse the generality of this initial attempt as
this will probably sound border line crazy talk..

Yes. :-p


As developers we spend essentially the totality of a focus on - in
pretty much in following order of priority:

i.) features,
ii.) performance,
iii.) bug fixes.

However we spend no serious mental energy on how our software preforms
regarding the environmental impact. Now, while it is true we do think a
little about battery life and also performance, this isn't usually our
highest of priorities and is somewhat an indirect method of solving the
problem. I can't think of too many examples where we have actually gone
really out our way to think about this problem and come up with tools to
address it, apart from perhaps powertop.

As nice as powertop may be, the real way to go here is to make it unnecessary, by implementing good defaults.

Also, what's the impact of the energy consumption of a CPU/GPU over its lifetime vs. the impact of the production and waste disposal?

I'd expect the (potential) impact of the driver software to be comparatively small in the grand scheme of things. To the extent that it matters, battery life and performance already provide good forcing functions.

The transmission mechanism through which software probably matters most here is that the overall suckage of it (hello, JavaScript websites and ads) encourages people to buy new hardware sooner than might otherwise be necessary.

Cheers,
Nicolai


What do folks think, and how could we start thinking about technical
ways to address this problem?

Kind Regards,
Edward.



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