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Game Console Energy Usage Comparison
Broadband writes "Modern gaming consoles consume more and more power, dissipate more and more heat and cause a lot more noise with their cooling systems compared to their brethren a decade ago.
While it's obvious that an Xbox 360 would have higher energy demands then a Playstation 1, the curious question is by how much? Even more importantly is the question of whether your console might be costing you money while you sleep. Preposterous you say? Actually quite the opposite!
We put every console in our lab through rigorous testing to find the answers to these questions and see who the energy hogs really are. "
I don't see the merit of comparing consoles from different generations for their power comsumption. Of course they need more juice... but they're doing a lot more with it.
??? I can get you an ARM board that'll be three times as fast as a Pentium 90, but use barely a fraction of the power.
Believe it or not, computer equipment *is* getting more efficient. The problem is that massive amounts of power are being dumped into them for "maximum performance". Shades of Alpha?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The catch is this--the "off button" doesn't really turn the cable box off, because it wants to keep processing the program information data ("Friends is on channel 7 at 7:30) that's being trickled down the cable, that requires the tuners and microprocessor and such to be on, leaving little difference in power use for the cable box between "on" and "off". This means that, when I turn the TV on, it can be 10-20 minutes before I have a fully populated program grid.
I'm a nature photographer.
Fail, the DreamCast came earlier than the other consoles from it's generation, but it was the same generation as the PS2, Xbox and GC (hint: the PS1 killed the Saturn while the full-of-lies announce of the PS2 slaughtered the DreamCast)
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Interesting, but ridiculously overplayed. The costs of operating a game console over the course of a year is pretty much nothing. Even taking the most expensive: $20.00 a year to operate Xbox 360... is still 5 cents a day. I'm sure the gamer can take the half second and pull that out of the couch he is sitting on.
It's always confirmation bias!
The Watts per performance unit have been getting lower lately, not higher. That is obviously offset by the performance increasing. So the original poster's point was that it's really unknown how that balances out.
When the PS1 was first released, it probably used a lot more power than when they re-released it several years later. If they were to build a PSone today using the very latest technology, it would probably consume less than a Watt at full tilt.
E pluribus unum
Actually, there have been at least three publicized core events: the Idaho Falls failure, TMI, and Chernobyl. Of the three, only Chernobyl proceded from full core failure to melt-through. That was due to the poor engineering behind the Russian plant, not to the intrinsic danger of a core event.
For a sense of what is possible, the French SuperPhoenix and Canadian CanDu reactors have combined for millenia of event-free operation. France, by the way, depends on nuclear power for 80% of its electrical needs -- the French are chuckling over the current energy price crunch...all the way to the bank.
Furthermore, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl is by no means "uninhabitable" when you get more than about 200m from the sarcophagus itself. Ukraine has taken a very reasonable precaution of maintaining the evacuation, but the area is completely habitable, as demonstrated by the variety of animal and plant life which has taken up residence there.
I'm still worried about the viability of Yucca Mountain, and feel strongly that we need a non-proliferative reprocessing technology before the US adopts nuclear power completely -- but don't deceive yourself about the its problems. They're nowhere nearly as bad as you think, and the mass poisoning coal inflicts on children, in particular, is far worse than you imagine.