Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuatoru | Hacker News Reader

> there's a balance where you need to think how much of the environment and money would I be saving by keeping using very old hardware instead of throwing it away,

... maybe? Think global. Making CPUs uses an amazing amount of power in making the metallurgical silicon, refining to poly silicon, refining it again to semiconductor grade, refining it again, and then the whole slice polish lithography chain. All of that is still coal powered.

And the chemicals used, and the byproducts created in the chemical manufacture and use, and the amazing quantities of water that are used in the earlier steps of the chain.

Unless you're getting your electricity by burning rainforests, it seems better for the environment to avoid causing new chips to be made, by continuing to use old ones.

View on HN

It's relatively safe to assume that a $200 CPU contains less than $200 worth of embodied energy. And while the energy used to manufacture the CPU will be cheaper than what a European pays at the outlet, it's not that much cheaper.

your reasoning assumes no subsidies

$200 is a gross upper limit. It's more likely that a $200 CPU contains $20 of embodied energy. It's highly unlikely that the energy is subsidized by >90%.

>Unless you're getting your electricity by burning rainforests, it seems better for the environment to avoid causing new chips to be made, by continuing to use old ones.

You're also paying for the extra electricity the old CPU uses out of your pocket, plus the extra time it takes to finish certain tasks, lowering your productivity loosing you money.

If you value energy efficiency and productivity, you can upgrade and flip the old CPU on the second hand market to someone for whom the energy efficiency and productivity gains are less important than using an old cheap CPU instead of buying a new expesnive one. Win-win.

The price of a new processor readily embodies the energy used to create it (by a significant margin, because of all the other stuff that needs to be paid for by the price of the processor)

It's a very safe bet that, assuming you do significant work with the processor, that a modern processor will more than make up for its inefficiency.

Environmental damage is mostly not included in the price of goods. Economics has a word, externality, to describe this.

Right, but we were talking about the energy embodied in manufacturing a processor. It should be obvious that the price of the processor includes the cost of the energy needed to manufacture it, and therefore there is a clear cap on how much extra energy a processor can consume before it would be obviously better to get a more modern and efficient processor.

Your points are valid, but we also have to factor in the amount of electricity consumed by gen X chip vs gen X+1 chip to perform certain amount of computing during their lifetime.

Also don't forget the amount of energy required to deliver it to your house, and the fact that energy is probably more carbon-intensive than the energy powering your old CPU.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com