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Most Game Console Power Draw Comes From Time Spent Idling
hypnosec writes "Springer Science and Business Media has discovered that during 2010, almost 70 per cent of the overall power draw of the world's consoles was thanks to idling. This total came to over 10.8 TWh of energy, equating to well over a billion dollars in wasted power. The biggest culprit for the trio of main consoles of this generation was the PlayStation 3, with its first edition having an active power draw of 180 watts and an idling draw of 167. As the report states, the Xbox 360 wasn't much better however, with active/idle draws of 172/162w respectively. Both of those consoles have got far better with their hardware revisions, more than halving the idle power consumption, but the Wii has been ahead of the curve the whole time. Its active/idle power draws were as low as 16/11w. The only real difference with the Nintendo console was whether its WC24 was enabled or not. With it on, standby power jumped from 2w to 9w."
It's the ease of use. Simple as that.
If you find a typo, you may keep it.
I think what surprises him (and me too, frankly) is that when the PS3 if powered 'off', it's not really off, merely in more of a sleep state. There are still active parts of the machine doing things like keeping the little red LED lit on the front, the bluetooth circuitry is active waiting for someone to hit the power button on a controller, etc. There really is no reason that they couldn't keep the USB ports powered up as well. I've often left my PS3 on overnight to charge the controllers, and then forgot to turn it off for several more days afterward.
I think one of the real culprits here is code, OS, and library bloat that causes boot times on consumer devices to be in the seconds or 10's of seconds from a cold start. Even my TV takes about 5-10 seconds after I hit power before I can actually watch anything. The lazy way to mitigate this is to not ever really power down, but just appear to. There really is no excuse to take this long to boot into what should be a minimal OS from flash memory. This laziness costs consumers cold hard cash, albeit over months and years.
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