Does it really matter what the environmental impact is of a byte?
So far it seems that economic factors play a much larger role in the amount of energy produced and consumed rather than efficiency metrics ever did. The 35 watt tdp laptop I have now has much more performant and efficient than the same 35 TDP laptop I bought years ago. There's barely any reduction in TDP across the entire market. All that newfound computing power has been sucked up by innovations like compilers that are pushing new limits on the amount of optimizations they can do. Some tasks have had significant and permanent reductions in power usage but other tasks seem to use exponentially more energy as a result of innovations in hardware/software, profit and lower energy prices.
Google is a good example of a company that provides similar services yet uses more and more energy because they can and people desire that.
So far it seems that economic factors play a much larger role in the amount of energy produced and consumed rather than efficiency metrics ever did. The 35 watt tdp laptop I have now has much more performant and efficient than the same 35 TDP laptop I bought years ago. There's barely any reduction in TDP across the entire market. All that newfound computing power has been sucked up by innovations like compilers that are pushing new limits on the amount of optimizations they can do. Some tasks have had significant and permanent reductions in power usage but other tasks seem to use exponentially more energy as a result of innovations in hardware/software, profit and lower energy prices.
Google is a good example of a company that provides similar services yet uses more and more energy because they can and people desire that.