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Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

The solution described in the blog uses 12 Nvidia T4s, which are basically specialized RTX 2080s. Depending on what vCPUs etc. get used, it's running 1000-1500 W of computing power continuously.

If their car was electric, this project would be increasing the power consumption of the vehicle by around 10%.

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I may have missed something, but I believe the T4s are running in the cloud, so it wouldn't have any effect on the car's power consumption.

To clarify, I mean indirectly the power consumption. I guess this will become an important point of discussion soon-ish, as we get more and more electric cars and ML stuff in them.

My view is, if your car uses electrons, and some of those are for compute, and you just offload the compute to the cloud, you haven't actually reduced the total electricity consumption.

Similarly here, the total "footprint" of the car is increased by adding this feature.

To be honest, there are open source ALPR (https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr) that could probably run lower framerates even on modern i7 processors (http://doc.openalpr.com/getting_started.html#hardware-requir..., https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FNwEuJAgZ1LyM2GGd7VR...)

Whether the car uses electrons or fossil fuels is pretty irrelevant, right?

I think the comparison with an electric car is to illustrate that this cloud solution is a waste of energy.

For a project that's intended to be a part of a car, cloud only makes sense for prototyping. 900 ms latency? Uh-oh.

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