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throwaway3231 • 04/01/2025 • 1 reply • view on HN

It's usually more energy-efficient to finish a task quickly with a higher power draw, also known as race-to-idle.


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naveen_k • 04/01/2025

Good point. I'm often running multiple parallel jobs with varying priorities where uniform throttling actually makes sense. Many LLM inference tasks are long-running but not fully utilizing hardware (often waiting on I/O or running at partial capacity)

The dual Epyc CPUs (128 cores) in my setup have a relatively high idle power draw compared to consumer chips. Even when "idle" they're consuming significant power maintaining all those cores and I/O capabilities. By implementing uniform throttling when utilization is low, the automation actually reduces the baseline power consumption by a decent amount without much performance hit.

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