You should try that calculation of yours with kWh pricing in Europe.
My energy contract now contains a unit price of € 0.60
That's a full 100 EUR
per year on a rig of 1000. Suddenly we're speaking of 10% additional cost of ownership. And that's even with limiting to 150W - you only calculated the
difference to another top end part.
Say you run the rig five years. That's
half the purchase price for a few % extra perf.
Oh... and let's not forget about cooling requirements too, they also add up to initial cost.
Bandwagons, indeed. Even at 26 dollars per year (still $125,- in additional expenses over 5 years, still 12,5% in total if the rig were 1k) the added performance does not weigh up to the cost, but at 4x that expense, we're in silly land, thanks for confirming this. The power consumption 'bandwagon' was always there, and it will always matter, despite what you like to think based on a very low cost for electricity. This isn't an Alder Lake & onwards point of discussion either, and its still a fact CPU TDPs are exploding.
Regardless, you do have a point, especially (and perhaps exclusively) when it comes to K-parts, users can indeed tweak those and are expected to do so. But then one might wonder why the higher end parts are even in the picture, for most, its a completely pointless exercise. And those that do
need those cores, are the specific group that is liable to run that all core load we're calculating here
For that group this inefficiency question stands and total cost of ownership is going to take a hit.
I think the most important part of the TDP increases we see, is the sentiment that goes along with it. The industry is moving in a direction that seems counter intuitive, and frankly, IS counter intuitive if we consider the challenges ahead of us. Why are we not trending towards equal performance at lower stock TDPs; or just same TDP and better perf/w? After all, the performance isn't actually needed on consumer, anywhere. We need a massive turnaround in our approach to everything if we even want to stabilize our harmful output on the planet.
Maybe that unit cost for energy needs to be much higher still before we get the memo.
