I don’t understand why they would target the server-side when the client side has an order of magnitude higher energy costs. Even the article they link about Ubisoft calls this out, as their data centers were only 8% of their total emissions.
Overall, the energy usage of electronics pales in comparison to other causes of climate change. Playing minecraft with your friends (~10 gCO2e per hour) is probably one of the greenest things you can do for fun compared to driving to meet up in person (~400 gCO2e per mile) or going to a restaurant and eating any kind of animal (~850-8500 gCO2e per 3oz serving).
There are a lot more consequences than just energy consumption with electronics usage, for example building the devices (which people buy in greater amount and more frequently as time passes), the pollution of their non-recycling, etc. (Some things are less easily measured in carbon-equivalent, for example the augmented usage of rare-earth metals and its geopolitical impact.)
I think we’re in agreement. The impacts of the hardware are also an order of magnitude higher on the client side than the server side. Each client needs a whole computer, while each server can serve hundreds or thousands of clients.
While items like “material efficiency” and “enhanced recycling” are on the list, they are smaller items and include more products than just electronics. So it’s not nothing, but I just think the tech industry hyper focuses on data centers to the detriment of more impactful things like transportation or land use (primarily animal agriculture).
I’d guess because that’s easier to measure and show, and its comparable between the players. Not saying that the client efficiency is not relevant or not interesting, but it’s a different thing.
I don’t think the point is “we save XX watts of power on our server”, but the part of “if we expose the power need to our players, what happens”. And again for the client part, having people measure their power usage locally would be a bunch of extra complexity.
I wish I’d known those numbers when I was a teenager. Kids! Learn these for next time your parents tell you to get off Counter-Strike (or whatever the new thing is).
I admit this is probably on the border to off-topic, but I think the part of how exposing the power constraints shapes player behavior is interesting and relevant:
One interesting discovery we made early is that flying in Minecraft consumes more power than walking. Minecraft players everywhere know that finding an Elytra (a set of wings for the player to use) is one of the great rewards of the game. In our world, though, too much flight will deplete the battery faster and shorten the uptime of the server.
This tradeoff becomes even more interesting in multiplayer games, where the actions of one player have serious consequences for the experiences of others. Will some players work out ways of co-ordinating their play to maximize energy efficiency and server uptime? Will others essentially drain power by flying around indiscriminately?
Will some players work out ways of co-ordinating their play to maximize energy efficiency and server uptime? Will others essentially drain power by flying around indiscriminately?
If I have learned anything about gaming in the last 2 decades, it’s that if this server gets popular, you’ll immediately see bored people who do everything in their power to drain that battery as quickly as humanly possible.
Less “closed”, but more — this happens because the people from the random depths of the internet are not invested in the community. It’s easier to trash a place you’ve never been to before than it is to trash a local cafe where you’ve talked to the owner, are on good terms with the regular patrons, etc.
I think the problem with elytra is that you’re loading/generating chunks much more quickly than with almost any other means of transport (to the point where I’ve had to do holding patterns or land to let my server catch up on chunk generation) and that’s going to be more energy impactful in whatever system you’re in - whether it’s loading the chunks from disk or burning the CPU to generate them.
I always find this and things like https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ to be super interesting, in part because I think it’s going to become a more common pattern as time goes on. With our failure to do almost anything about climate change, a considerable percentage of our population is going to be absolutely reliant on air conditioning to stay alive. That suggests to me that “optional” services like servers and other technology is going to need to operate within the confines of green energy like solar since they’ll effectively be best effort.
Now the other option (which is actually starting to come together) is more and more datacenters have their own power generation with small nuclear reactors or their own large green energy systems and this conversation more or less becomes moot.
The dithering they use on this website always amuses me, since dithered images are harder to compress and thus use more energy.
With our failure to do almost anything about climate change, a considerable percentage of our population is going to be absolutely reliant on air conditioning to stay alive. That suggests to me that “optional” services like servers and other technology is going to need to operate within the confines of green energy like solar since they’ll effectively be best effort.
A low energy server uses such tiny amounts of electricity compared to air conditioning that if you have enough energy to run air conditioning most of the time, the additional power needed by the server would be negligible. Datacenters use a lot of power in part because they run a lot of servers in one place, and in part because they’re not aiming to maximize energy efficiency. If power becomes scarcer, optimizing for energy efficiency would be the first thing to do.
There’s also already a giant incentive to increase density per rack of server usage. That’s a major draw of the whole “serverless” industry, to get consumers away from the idea of a static amount of CPU per instance and instead pay per second of usage distributed across machines where they can be run for maximum usage per rack. You can’t easily get more power into a DC because it comes with a giant set of costs, increasing your generator capacity, putting more power cables into the floor, more cooling because more hot aisles.
But that’s also why we are seeing organizations begin the work of adopting their own power generation to get them off the grid and make their usage a nonissue. It’s not because they think in the future that usage will drop, but because they intend for it to grow.
Ahhhh grabbing one of the images randomly off the site and running file on it suggests that they’re actually encoded as 4-bit PNGs so they probably compress down pretty well. The image itself is 21kB and as raw 8-bit pixels it would be 416kB or 1249kB as raw 24-bit (8-bit each RGB) pixels. A 20:1 compression ratio is pretty solid.
Human progress has always been exclusively linked with ever-increasing massive energy surpluses. It started with the ability to build ovens hot enough to melt steel, and in recent history with more and more abundant energy sources (coal in the industrial revolution, oil since the first half of the 20th century, nuclear energy since the second half of the 20th century).
I can’t help but think that the focus on energy consumption/preservation (indirectly in units of CO₂ emission) is backwards-oriented, and I think that as long as we go along this path humanity will be staggered in its development, maybe even stagnate. And it’s not for lack of knowledge! We see this limit in energy consumption in many fields, most prominently right now probably regarding LLM-pretraining.
Here in Germany/EU we are dead on regarding CO₂ savings/neutrality, however, BRICS countries don’t care about these aspects, and their massive growth easily nivellates anything that we do. If Germany stopped existing tomorrow, our CO₂ emissions would be factored in by China and India alone within one year, and you can do the arithmetic for less extreme cases of a certain percentage of CO₂ emission savings. However, we already see the effects on our industry, as more and more moves away from Germany, slowly turning us into a deindustrialised nation.
Long story short, this is a thing that keeps me thinking. In terms of computing, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to assume that at some point the USA and BRICS nations (who partake less in this CO₂ savings/neutrality ideology) will win the arms race in terms of AI training, while Europe will be left in the dust. It’s a sad state, really.
You do understand that the CO₂ emissions you’re talking about are directly and indirectly driving climate change, right? Your strategy for fixing that can’t be “step one burn all the coal, step two ???, step three AGI solves all our problems”.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough with my statement: Germany/EU is all in on reducing CO₂, whereas e.g. China, India, USA, etc. aren’t. In comparison, any savings by Germany/EU are irrelevant and destroy our economy here, as these other economies’ CO₂ emissions grow faster every year than the total CO₂ output of Germany.
I am not advocating for coal, though, which is a backwards technology. I was more thinking of nuclear as a bridge towards nuclear fusion. I see investments into new NPPs and fusion technology research as much more reasonable than just stupidly stacking windmills and solar cells imported from China and India.
In comparison, any savings by Germany/EU are irrelevant and destroy our economy here
This is not true. In developed economies, economic growth has already been decoupled from CO2 in several countries. I don’t know if Germany is behind on that or something, but e.g. both Sweden and the USA have had economic growth (per capita) while CO2 emissions have flatlined or slightly declined (per capita). This is true even if you use a consumption-based CO2 metric, where CO2 emissions aren’t counted for where the emissions happen, but for where the stuff produced is actually used.
One thing we can do is enact a carbon-based import tax to discourage imports from countries that aren’t doing as much to reduce their emissions.
I see investments into new NPPs and fusion technology research as much more reasonable than just stupidly stacking windmills and solar cells imported from China and India.
I feel like when you say “Germany/EU”, you mostly mean Germany :p
[–] both Sweden and the USA have had economic growth (per capita) while CO2 emissions have flatlined or slightly declined (per capita). This is true even if you use a consumption-based CO2 metric [–]
I’d like to read more about this. The studies I’ve seen earlier, admittedly a long time ago, didn’t show this kind of “decoupling”, as it’s often called. I’d love to be proved wrong though!
In terms of computing, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to assume that at some point the USA and BRICS nations (who partake less in this CO₂ savings/neutrality ideology) will win the arms race in terms of AI training, while Europe will be left in the dust. It’s a sad state, really.
Not only AI training. OTOH the EU could lead the way on other fields like, maybe, green tech? Humans know that economic growth at all costs isn’t sustainable forever within our current ecosystem, but we’re just starting to materialize this knowledge.
That’s a tautology. Space has two things in abundance - vast distances and hard radiation. What it doesn’t have is breathable air, drinkable water and arable soil.
Earth has that - for now, and not everywhere. We can do better than dream of impossible goals in outer space by actually taking care of what we have now.
I wonder if they’ve chosen the most energy-efficient possible configuration for their server. The article just says it’s a mini-PC. I wonder if an Apple Silicon Mac would get better performance per watt, and better idle power usage too. Yes, it sucks that the most energy-efficient processor at that scale is probably in the vertically integrated Apple platform.
I don’t understand why they would target the server-side when the client side has an order of magnitude higher energy costs. Even the article they link about Ubisoft calls this out, as their data centers were only 8% of their total emissions.
Overall, the energy usage of electronics pales in comparison to other causes of climate change. Playing minecraft with your friends (~10 gCO2e per hour) is probably one of the greenest things you can do for fun compared to driving to meet up in person (~400 gCO2e per mile) or going to a restaurant and eating any kind of animal (~850-8500 gCO2e per 3oz serving).
There are a lot more consequences than just energy consumption with electronics usage, for example building the devices (which people buy in greater amount and more frequently as time passes), the pollution of their non-recycling, etc. (Some things are less easily measured in carbon-equivalent, for example the augmented usage of rare-earth metals and its geopolitical impact.)
I think we’re in agreement. The impacts of the hardware are also an order of magnitude higher on the client side than the server side. Each client needs a whole computer, while each server can serve hundreds or thousands of clients.
For the overall causes of climate change, there’s an IPCC report with a great diagram of the possible opportunities with their impact, feasibility, and cost all quantified (figure SPM.7 on page 27): https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_SPM.pdf
While items like “material efficiency” and “enhanced recycling” are on the list, they are smaller items and include more products than just electronics. So it’s not nothing, but I just think the tech industry hyper focuses on data centers to the detriment of more impactful things like transportation or land use (primarily animal agriculture).
I’d guess because that’s easier to measure and show, and its comparable between the players. Not saying that the client efficiency is not relevant or not interesting, but it’s a different thing.
I don’t think the point is “we save XX watts of power on our server”, but the part of “if we expose the power need to our players, what happens”. And again for the client part, having people measure their power usage locally would be a bunch of extra complexity.
I wish I’d known those numbers when I was a teenager. Kids! Learn these for next time your parents tell you to get off Counter-Strike (or whatever the new thing is).
I admit this is probably on the border to off-topic, but I think the part of how exposing the power constraints shapes player behavior is interesting and relevant:
If I have learned anything about gaming in the last 2 decades, it’s that if this server gets popular, you’ll immediately see bored people who do everything in their power to drain that battery as quickly as humanly possible.
Agreed, this kind of thing will only work in somewhat closed communities.
Less “closed”, but more — this happens because the people from the random depths of the internet are not invested in the community. It’s easier to trash a place you’ve never been to before than it is to trash a local cafe where you’ve talked to the owner, are on good terms with the regular patrons, etc.
“I built a prime seive in Redstone”
“I built a prime seive in
Redstonevillagers in minecarts”Fixed that for you.
I wonder if they could afford to fly in Luanti not being Java
I think the problem with elytra is that you’re loading/generating chunks much more quickly than with almost any other means of transport (to the point where I’ve had to do holding patterns or land to let my server catch up on chunk generation) and that’s going to be more energy impactful in whatever system you’re in - whether it’s loading the chunks from disk or burning the CPU to generate them.
I always find this and things like https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ to be super interesting, in part because I think it’s going to become a more common pattern as time goes on. With our failure to do almost anything about climate change, a considerable percentage of our population is going to be absolutely reliant on air conditioning to stay alive. That suggests to me that “optional” services like servers and other technology is going to need to operate within the confines of green energy like solar since they’ll effectively be best effort.
Now the other option (which is actually starting to come together) is more and more datacenters have their own power generation with small nuclear reactors or their own large green energy systems and this conversation more or less becomes moot.
The dithering they use on this website always amuses me, since dithered images are harder to compress and thus use more energy.
A low energy server uses such tiny amounts of electricity compared to air conditioning that if you have enough energy to run air conditioning most of the time, the additional power needed by the server would be negligible. Datacenters use a lot of power in part because they run a lot of servers in one place, and in part because they’re not aiming to maximize energy efficiency. If power becomes scarcer, optimizing for energy efficiency would be the first thing to do.
I mean AI and cryptocurrency is consuming any gains made by the transition to ARM, which is still not a super widespread transition in the datacenter. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/global-data-center-electricity-use-to-double-by-2026-report/
There’s also already a giant incentive to increase density per rack of server usage. That’s a major draw of the whole “serverless” industry, to get consumers away from the idea of a static amount of CPU per instance and instead pay per second of usage distributed across machines where they can be run for maximum usage per rack. You can’t easily get more power into a DC because it comes with a giant set of costs, increasing your generator capacity, putting more power cables into the floor, more cooling because more hot aisles.
But that’s also why we are seeing organizations begin the work of adopting their own power generation to get them off the grid and make their usage a nonissue. It’s not because they think in the future that usage will drop, but because they intend for it to grow.
Ahhhh grabbing one of the images randomly off the site and running
fileon it suggests that they’re actually encoded as 4-bit PNGs so they probably compress down pretty well. The image itself is 21kB and as raw 8-bit pixels it would be 416kB or 1249kB as raw 24-bit (8-bit each RGB) pixels. A 20:1 compression ratio is pretty solid.Human progress has always been exclusively linked with ever-increasing massive energy surpluses. It started with the ability to build ovens hot enough to melt steel, and in recent history with more and more abundant energy sources (coal in the industrial revolution, oil since the first half of the 20th century, nuclear energy since the second half of the 20th century).
I can’t help but think that the focus on energy consumption/preservation (indirectly in units of CO₂ emission) is backwards-oriented, and I think that as long as we go along this path humanity will be staggered in its development, maybe even stagnate. And it’s not for lack of knowledge! We see this limit in energy consumption in many fields, most prominently right now probably regarding LLM-pretraining.
Here in Germany/EU we are dead on regarding CO₂ savings/neutrality, however, BRICS countries don’t care about these aspects, and their massive growth easily nivellates anything that we do. If Germany stopped existing tomorrow, our CO₂ emissions would be factored in by China and India alone within one year, and you can do the arithmetic for less extreme cases of a certain percentage of CO₂ emission savings. However, we already see the effects on our industry, as more and more moves away from Germany, slowly turning us into a deindustrialised nation.
Long story short, this is a thing that keeps me thinking. In terms of computing, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to assume that at some point the USA and BRICS nations (who partake less in this CO₂ savings/neutrality ideology) will win the arms race in terms of AI training, while Europe will be left in the dust. It’s a sad state, really.
You do understand that the CO₂ emissions you’re talking about are directly and indirectly driving climate change, right? Your strategy for fixing that can’t be “step one burn all the coal, step two ???, step three AGI solves all our problems”.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough with my statement: Germany/EU is all in on reducing CO₂, whereas e.g. China, India, USA, etc. aren’t. In comparison, any savings by Germany/EU are irrelevant and destroy our economy here, as these other economies’ CO₂ emissions grow faster every year than the total CO₂ output of Germany.
I am not advocating for coal, though, which is a backwards technology. I was more thinking of nuclear as a bridge towards nuclear fusion. I see investments into new NPPs and fusion technology research as much more reasonable than just stupidly stacking windmills and solar cells imported from China and India.
This is not true. In developed economies, economic growth has already been decoupled from CO2 in several countries. I don’t know if Germany is behind on that or something, but e.g. both Sweden and the USA have had economic growth (per capita) while CO2 emissions have flatlined or slightly declined (per capita). This is true even if you use a consumption-based CO2 metric, where CO2 emissions aren’t counted for where the emissions happen, but for where the stuff produced is actually used.
One thing we can do is enact a carbon-based import tax to discourage imports from countries that aren’t doing as much to reduce their emissions.
I feel like when you say “Germany/EU”, you mostly mean Germany :p
I’d like to read more about this. The studies I’ve seen earlier, admittedly a long time ago, didn’t show this kind of “decoupling”, as it’s often called. I’d love to be proved wrong though!
Here is a short article that cites recent data on CO2 emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling
Not only AI training. OTOH the EU could lead the way on other fields like, maybe, green tech? Humans know that economic growth at all costs isn’t sustainable forever within our current ecosystem, but we’re just starting to materialize this knowledge.
Maybe the next step is space, but you need a lot of energy for that.
What is available in space that’s not available here on Earth that would motivate the enormous investment required to reach it?
Space
That’s a tautology. Space has two things in abundance - vast distances and hard radiation. What it doesn’t have is breathable air, drinkable water and arable soil.
Earth has that - for now, and not everywhere. We can do better than dream of impossible goals in outer space by actually taking care of what we have now.
I wonder if they’ve chosen the most energy-efficient possible configuration for their server. The article just says it’s a mini-PC. I wonder if an Apple Silicon Mac would get better performance per watt, and better idle power usage too. Yes, it sucks that the most energy-efficient processor at that scale is probably in the vertically integrated Apple platform.