Timmy, turn off the PC or we'll have to visit you in prison

[Robert17]

I followed a trail from Pixy Misa and wound up seeing this article. It seems that 5 U.S. states have decided that they need to regulate power consumption of PCs. I'm not sure how they would enforce the law or what it spells out in regards to DIY builders. But it certainly has Dell's attention, problably other builders as well.

Does anyone from the five state's affected have any more direct input?

 

[WhitehawkEQ]

I wonder how this will affect miners, folders and other distributed computing projects?
And what gives someone else the right to tell anyone how long they can have their PC turned on? Oh and there goes the high power servers, they will have to move them to another state.

 

[notarat]

These regulations (California's, anyway) were enacted 5 years ago. Certain other states adopt (by default) the regulations that California enacted because they feel California's power regulations are good for combating Global Warming, and it saves them (the other states) the time and effort required to create the same regulations. (Why waste tax dollars re-creating the proverbial wheel?)

They scheduled certain timeframes for when different sections of the regulations took effect. They staggered implementation of these sections in order to give companies ample lead time (5 years) to update their products to comply.

Dell failed.

 

[tRidiot]

They're regulating power usage - same as telling people they have to set their thermostats higher in the summer or lower in the winter.

It's for the good of the public.

And wear your mask, too!

And you can't go to church.

And...

And...

And...

 

[stompah]

Jayztwocents had a good video about it. I half paid attention to it.

Sounded like they were concentrating on idle power usage. Also, they are using a scoring system. The bigger the system the more power is allowed.

If it becomes an issue I will have to purchase and have items delivered to a friend in a state with brains and then have them ship to me.


Just another law created by people who have no idea.

 

[mackerel]

I skimmed through this on another forum. It seems widely misunderstood.

It applies to high volume system manufacturers. Small builders (I think I saw 50 units mentioned) and self builders are not affected in any way.

It aims to reduce power consumption of PCs when they are idle or otherwise not in use. This includes on but not doing anything, sleep mode, and "off" modes. Even when "off" you usually still have various standby power circuits active, unless you pull the plug. It does not do anything about in-use power! So you can still run your 300W GPUs with 200W CPUs as long as you like. The power consumption is weighted, and practically speaking it was 35% idle, 65% sleep/off. So that is roughly comparable to 8 hours a day every day, or 12 hours for 5 days.

It recognises that more performant PCs will use more power than less performant PCs, so a high power workstation will have different limits than a thin client. This is where it gets really messy, as they give points for different classes, ports and some hardware specs. I think they had to do this, as opposed to a more sensible efficiency metric for notable components, since the latter would be impractical to enforce at a state level. It would have to be applied nationally to work.

At a practical level, this might start to kill off RGB from prebuilts, since that does not contribute to performance and will eat into the power allowance. I don't know if they can get away with it by shipping it RGB fitted but disabled. It is up to the user to enable it and burn that power. AIOs might be another victim to this.

 

[David]

Minimising power usage from servers/HPC systems is nothing new.

When we upgraded the University HPC clustera few years ago we went from 12 core/48 GB nodes to 40 core/192 GB nodes (plus some 80 core/3TB nodes) which boosted performance significantly and brought power usage down to around a third. Similarly, we've upgraded our GPU nodes from four 16 core/64GB/V100 nodes to only two 40 core/192GB/4xA100 nodes.

Anyone with lots of compute resource *wants* lower power usage, so I don't see a problem with setting [sensible] limits on idle power draw. Whether the limits are sensible ...

 

[ihrsetrdr]

Southern California Edison's multi tiered rate structure killed off my folding operation years ago, $500+ /mo. was getting outlandish for 2 people in a 1700 sq. ft.

 

[dfonda]

I actually like it...has no effect on me (PA.) but my newer washer, dryer and fridge all adhere to higher efficiency guidelines and that contributes to the fact I can afford to burn electric on PC's for science (fah).

When Federal guidelines prevent power grids from failing and get Pandemics to slow down , I am all for them...

Also most of us build our own so it has no effect on us. (Sneaks away to hide 2 1300W and 1000W PSU's)

Been wondering for a while if the DEA is going to knock on my door and ask me if I am growing weed...