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cwillu comments on Open Thread: May 2010 - Less Wrong
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Many != all.
My desktop is old enough that it uses very little more power at full capacity than it does at idle.
Additionally, you can configure (may be the default, not sure) the client to not increase the clock rate.
It is also not equal to 'some'. The vast majority of computers today will use more power when running folding at home than they would if they were not running folding at home. There may be some specific cases where this is not true but it will generally be true.
You've measured that have you? Here's an example of some actual measurements for a range of current processors' power draw at idle and under load. It's not a vast difference but it is real and ranges from about 30W / 40% increase in total system power draw to around 100W / 100% increase.
I couldn't find mention of any such setting on their site. Do you have a link to an explanation of this setting?
On further consideration, my complaint wasn't my real/best argument, consider this a redirect to rwallace's response above :p
That said, I personally don't take 'many' as meaning 'most', but more in the sense of "a significant fraction", which may be as little as 1/5 and as much as 4/5. I'd be somewhat surprised if the number of old machines (5+ years old) in use wasn't in that range.
re: scaling, the Ubuntu folding team's wiki describes the approach.
Idle could also mean 'off', which would be significant power savings even (especially?) for older CPUs.
One who refers to their powered-off computer as 'idle' might find themselves missing an arm.
Except I'm talking about opportunity cost rather than redefining the word. You can turn off a machine you aren't using, a machine that's idle.