alt Hacker NewsWell. Running your machine to do inference will utilize more than 50W sustained load, I'd say more than double that. Plus electricity is more expensive here (but granted, I do have solar panels). Plus don't forget to factor in that your hardware will age faster.
I'd say it's not worth it. But the idea is cool.
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kennywinker • today at 5:42 AM
Their estimate is based on significantly lower consumption when under load. E.g. 25W for an M4 Pro mac mini. I have no idea if that’s realistic - but the m4s are supposedly pretty efficient (https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/m4-mac-minis-efficien...)
Your hardware will age slower if you have consistent load.
Thermal stress from bursty workloads is much more of a wearing problem than electromigration. If you can consistently keep the SoC at a specific temperature, it'll last much longer.
This is also why it was very ironic that crypto miner GPUs would get sold at massive discounts. Everyone assumed that they had been ran ragged, but a proper miner would have undervolted the card and ran it at consistent utilization, meaning the card would be in better condition than a secondhand gamer GPU that would have constantly been shifting between 1% to 80% utilization, or rather, 30°C to 75°C