Power

I’ve been in a number of data centres in my time. Probably the most famous would be The Red Room at the University of Waterloo. That’s not the only one – University of Western Ontario comes to mind as well as some data centres with computer districts.

The one thing that was common for all of them was that they were all air conditioned. A computer and peripherals all running as fast as they can draw a great deal of heat.

Just about anyone who has a personal computer at home knows that it doesn’t require air conditioning but a fan or two are necessary to keep the processing and graphic units cool. If they run really hot, those fans can really crank themselves and also a great deal of noise while doing it. If you don’t believe me, put your hand behind your CPU or put your laptop on your lap.

These days, we do so much in the web browser. The newest type of device like your smartphone or a Chromebook typically don’t generate that kind of heat and don’t need fans. Although, some of the newer more powerful Chromebook do.

We also like to think that so much we do is “in the cloud” whatever/wherever that is. It’s like the computer setup above. Large banks of computers and peripherals do the bulk of the work. We often don’t think about it but they really need some heavy duty cooling and that’s the point of this post.

Here are a couple of articles with some disturbing facts.

Should we be worried about AI’s growing energy use?

He estimates that if Google switched its whole search business to AI, it would end up using 29.3 terawatt hours per year – equivalent to the electricity consumption of Ireland

AI OVERLOAD – CHATGPT’S ENERGY CONSUMPTION RAISES EYEBROWS

ChatGPT consumes over 17,000 times the daily electricity of an average US household, according to a report by The New Yorker.

MICROSOFT IS DRAINING AN ARIZONA TOWN’S WATER SUPPLY FOR ITS AI
COULD WE JUST… NOT DO THAT?

Worsening AI’s massive environmental footprint is the fact that it also consumes a mind-boggling amount of water. AI pulls enough electricity from data centers that they risk overheating, so to mitigate that risk, engineers use water to cool the servers back down.

Macintosh people, don’t get too smug. You’ve in this too.

M3 MacBook Air Peak CPU Temperature Can Reach 114 Degrees Celsius, 33% Slower Than MacBook Pro With Same Chip Due To Lack Of A Fan

Somehow, the M3 MacBook Air continues to chug along, even with the highest CPU temperature reaching 114 degrees Celsius and the GPU touching 102.9 degrees Celsius. 

I’m feeling badly that I used AI to create that image above.

Now, on your personal computer, you can turn down the power that is needed. In Windows 11, the settings look like this.

I’ll be honest here; I didn’t change the settings originally for the good of electrical use. It was the podcast that Stephen Hurley and I on Wednesday mornings “This Week in Ontario Edublogs on voicEd Radio“. In his search for the perfect audio experience, Stephen had complained that he was picking up the noise of the fan on the recording.

So, I did dial everything down and he stopped complaining. Quite frankly, except for a dimmer screen, I haven’t noticed any change in doing whatever it is I happen to be doing. Somehow, I doubt that computers in data centres are in power saving mode.

The industry isn’t slowing down. I was just reading about the newest processors that you can buy for your computer.

intel Core I9 vs. AMD Ryzen 9: Which CPU Reigns Supreme?

Does the home user need all that? Take a look through BestBuy and you’ll see that the sweet spot seems to be the latest i5 processor. Yet the industry continues to give us more powerful machines.

If you want to drive AI crazy, ask it to explain Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems in simple words.

As we continue to escalate this, we will need to have more power. Around here, there was a real rush to get windmills in place but that seems to have stopped in the past few years.

I don’t have any answers but just hope that there are smarter people that me working on this.