On Mon, Dec 03, 2018 at 09:18:07AM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote: > > My hunch is that those chips are fairly expensive, ecologically, but > > where's the tipping point? > > I remember reading somewhere that back around the turn of the century > a laptop's RAM chips needed about the same energy to produce as the > laptop's energy consumption during its lifetime. "Energy"? Or "environmental externalities confounded?" Energy prices do vary around the world, but not by a huge factor it seems: witness the Bitcoin "factories" looking for places with cheap energy access, as energy costs take a significant part of total costs), while foundries don't seem to follow that pattern. OTOH other ecological externalities do vary *a lot* -- rare earth metals being a sobering example. > And AFAIK there are > precious few studies trying to measure such things, so who knows whee > things stand now. Yes, more transparency here would be something, wouldn't it? > I think it's fair to assume that chips are very expensive ecologically, > indeed, and optical disks are likely much cheaper in this regard. > > But the same amount of chips as a blu-ray drive probably gives you > a multi-TB HDD, so the tipping point probably requires use of more > than a hundred blu-ray disks. My feeling too... Cheers -- t
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