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Comment by qmr | Hacker News Reader

> Permacomputing is a design practice that encourages the maximization of hardware lifespan, minimization of energy usage

These two aims are diametrically opposed.

Compare performance per watt, P4, to Centrino, to M3 for example.

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The argument I've heard is (and unfortunately I can't find offhand where I've heard this), is basically rather than having new computers made and all the vast energy usage required to do so (mining/refining metals, computer usage to design new hardware, factories assembling stuff, electronics manufacturing, packaging, shipping, and all the pollution from these processes), it's far less harmful to the environment to just keep using what you have, as long as you can. The impact of continuing to use that old computer is even less when your source of energy is a renewable resource like solar or hydroelectric.

The only problem is that it the argument is intuitive but isn't true. It hasn't been true for justifying using gas guzzlers instead of more efficient vehicles and is based upon farcial assumptions about "new vehicle people" pancaking their old cars every six months instead of the actual truth where even the neophiles cars wind up still on the road even if they get new ones, that most people don't in fact have the brand new but the backlog of previously new.

It hasn't been true for servers either, as reflected by the resale price of old server hardware. It turns out power over a long time frame dominates over the manufacturing costs. From what I've seen, the argument is just bad math and bad assumptions all the way down at best. At worst it is willful ignorance in service of validating their assumptions regardless of the truth.

I mean.. I'm not feeling like you have sufficiently debunked the argument I was citing/referencing. I have a 2012 thinkpad, and a 2018 thinkpad. They both pull the same wattage. It didn't benefit anyone for me to upgrade to the newer model, other than I can have way more browser tabs open or whatever. But the newer machine had to be manufactured, packaged, shipped, etc.

Yeah, servers are far more power-efficient than they used to be, but that's not really what millions of households worldwide are constantly buying.

Here, since I didn't have any links/quotes initially, I figured I should spend the time to dig some up.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2011.03.004 > The manufacturing phase represents 62–70% of total primary energy of manufacturing and operation.

https://web.mit.edu/2.813/www/readings/Williams%20-%20Energy... > life cycle energy use of a computer is dominated by production (81%) as opposed to operation (19%).

Depends what you are accounting and optimizing for. At the high end of computing this is generally true but occasionally vendors get pretty far in front of their skis to goose performance like current Nvidia hardware or the P4 of yore. There are plenty of SoCs over the last decades that use a few watts that can do useful work. An MSP430 of any vintage could run for years on a battery bank. If the desired work meets a small power envelope newer doesn't automatically win if you are working in small quantity like home projects.

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