With the news of the increased consumption of components appearing in recent months for many, such a statement will seem like a joke. However, despite the doomsday scenario, that’s not quite the case. Since the vast majority of work done with a computer reduces power consumption over time and has a minor impact on the electricity bill.
When we talk about high consumption, rather TDP, since it’s not quite the same, we’re not talking about the average use of a computer. What we are talking about is the maximum consumption that said component can reach during the Boost period. That is, when it needs to increase its clock speed and voltage to solve the part of a program as quickly as possible. On the other hand, for the rest of the tasks and in particular those of daily life, a positive impact was observed on the cost of the electricity bill.
Why does a new PC spend less on electricity bills?
Imagine a computer processor being a cyclist, obviously it will put less effort where there are flats or descents, but it will put all the effort and physical effort on the climbs. We can therefore make a quick comparison, since these increases will occur when the processor is placed in Boost mode to increase its speed and therefore its consumption.
Over time and as you become fitter, what used to take a lot of effort from the rider will become less effort. Well, contemporary processors work the same way, they don’t give all the effort they can with light tasks. And when does a task become light for a CPU? When we have a newer and therefore more powerful system.
It’s easy to check, take two computers, one older than the other, and put them in exactly the same environment in terms of applications. You will see later that the CPU usage is less. Which means that the processor will not need to be tuned to high clock speeds to perform such a task with ease and without problems. And it is that the components of your computer will not use 100% of their performance if it is not necessary.
We must start from the fact that, although we sometimes talk about computers for games, the vast majority of PC users in the world use them for daily professional tasks which, over time, reduce the percentage of use compared to the total power of the computer. This has led to the appearance of low-power computers that many consider that with the slightly vitaminized version of mobile technology they can face the PC of their lives.
On-chip accelerators are essential to reduce consumption
An accelerator is a highly specialized piece of hardware for one task, so they are very simple pieces with limited utility. However, their particularity is that they can perform this task with ten times less consumption than when the central processor or another part takes care of it. For example, imagine that we need to open a compressed file in a specific format. It turns out that it is a very light task for the processor which can do it by consuming only 10W, but the accelerator can do the same thing with only 1W of consumption and with the same speed.
Little by little, the designers of our computer chips are adding these parts to perform common tasks, realizing that consumption is reduced in overall computing and with it the impact on our PC’s electricity bill is growing. minor. Let’s not forget either that at each iteration the hardware engineers seek to reduce as much as possible the consumption of the most used instructions in the programs.
