logoalt Hacker News

zahlmantoday at 12:54 PM1 replyview on HN

I'm not aware of any stories in the historical record of "real programmers" optimizing for power use, only for speed or code size.


Replies

abainbridgetoday at 2:55 PM

For a few years I worked in the team that wrote software for an embedded audio DSP. The power draw to do something was normally more important than the speed. Eg when decoding MP3 or SBC you probably had enough MIPS to keep up with the stream rate, so the main thing the customers cared about was battery life. Mostly the techniques to optimize for speed were the same as those for power. But I remember being told that add/sub used less power than multiply even though both were single cycle. And that for loops with fewer than 16 instructions used less power because there was a simple 16 instruction program memory cache that saved the energy required to fetch instructions from RAM or ROM. (The RAM and ROM access was generally single cycle too).

Nowadays, I expect optimizations that minimize energy consumption are an important target for LLM hosts.