What's the difference between 'energy conservation' and 'energy efficiency'?

What is the difference between energy efficiency and power efficiency of a CPU/GPU chip?

  • I know in this modern era of Energy first, for a CPU/GPU chip, energy efficiency is the primary metric. But, sometimes we regularly interchange the metrics Power efficiency and Energy efficiency. Although, I know that there is a clear difference between these 2 metrics, can anyone explain the intricate difference with examples?

  • Answer:

    Energy Efficiency usually deals with the total amount of electricity consumed.  For example: "CPU X consumes 65 watts under load but only 3 watts when in a low-power idle state."   We don't know how much work the CPU is getting done in these states, only how much electricity it's using. This is valuable for power consumption figures, like how long a device can run with a particular size battery. Power Efficiency usually deals with how much work the CPU can do for the amount of electricity consumed. "CPU X provides 100 MFLOPS per watt" or something similar. This is valuable for calculations dealing with cost of operation. However, both terms are often (mis)used interchangeably.

Pat Roberts at Quora Visit the source

Was this solution helpful to you?

Other answers

Either you want to talk about the performance per watt ratio, or the energy taking the memory into account as well. If you take the performance per watt ratio (PPW), then in the case of the GPU, it would depend on the application being run. Running a graphics application (requiring more parallelism) will provide you with a high PPW. However, running an inherently sequential app will use less cores on the GPU, so most of the energy will be wasted, lowering the PPW considerably. Also, a GPU core is much weaker than that of a CPU, and that'll also add to lowering the PPW. In the case of a say 4 core CPU, it should run sequential apps fairly well with a high PPW, while parallel apps wont scale much due to limited number of cores. If you take the memory into account, then GPUs mostly perform worse. This is because the GPU has a limited memory, and may have to get memory elements from the main memory (which means it would have to go through the GPU), which would result in energy wastage. The CPU will therefore perform much better in this case given the application uses a large memory footprint. The CPU and GPU are not meant to do each other's work, but with recent releases of multi-core CPUs (like the Xeon Phi), the gap seems to be closing down.

Masab Ahmad

A simple way to look at it would be to know that Energy = Power x time. While a processor may be power efficient (consumes less power) to do a certain task; it also is important to know how much time it takes to complete that task in that state. Some designs throttle the workload so that the overall energy consumed is kept low even when the processor is at a high power state(by doing so for a very small amount of time).

Jatin Kumar

Find solution

For every problem there is a solution! Proved by Solucija.

  • Got an issue and looking for advice?

  • Ask Solucija to search every corner of the Web for help.

  • Get workable solutions and helpful tips in a moment.

Just ask Solucija about an issue you face and immediately get a list of ready solutions, answers and tips from other Internet users. We always provide the most suitable and complete answer to your question at the top, along with a few good alternatives below.