How the Xbox’s default “instant on” feature could harm the environment
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What about all the extra power it draws for menial tasks like watching Netflix?
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Why not both in parallel? There's no need to do one of these _first_ when we should be doing all of them. Especially when the fix for something like the Xbox's power draw is trivially simple (changing the default mode). It's a false equivalency to compare the Xbox's power issue to replacing core urban infrastructure.
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Assume a computer takes 1 minute to boot up, and you do so twice a day.
Are you really saying that during its normal boot is uses 72000% as much power as during normal running? That'd do more than dim the lights
* 24hrs x 60min/hr / 2
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As far as I can tell they are comparable if not identical in "instant on" standby. Which isn't really *that* surprising, given that they're doing similar work in that mode.
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I have no qualms with using the energy saving mode, but I'd just like to ask one teeny-tiny favor of Microsoft... please reduce the volume of the Series X start-up sound. I don't know why it was designed to be so loud, but it's downright awful. (I don't know if the Series S has the same problem.)
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Exactly, how does the standby power compare to the active power with a utilization of say, eight hours a day, two days a week?
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I believe the PS5 also checks for/installs game/system updates in rest mode, so they're comparable in this way. The PS5 doesn't have a comparable "instant on" mode, though, so you do have to sit through the 10ish seconds of startup time regardless.
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Just make sure the auto-kill-switch isn't using more power than the appliance it is controlling's native standby draw - with newer equipment this is becoming more and more the case!
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There's more to booting up (or any sort of computer operation) than reading data off of a drive. While moving from spinning rust to SSDs can be a phenomenal (and relatively cheap) performance improvement, once all that data is read, the CPU still has to do something with that information. Also, consider that no matter what sort of drive you have, your motherboard has to go through its own startup routine.
I assume instant on is basically a hibernate state so it skips all that guff.
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This is useful context, and yes, 78 kWh in a year is not going to be a significant chunk of household energy use. But when this energy use is for *idle use*, rather than active use -- and when the only benefit is a few seconds of startup/update downloading convenience -- then the tradeoff is still worth considering.
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Boy, the NRDC's going to have a fit when they start looking at the computers with kilowatt power supplies with graphics cards that draw over 300W and CPUs that draw over 100W while gaming.
I agree with the NRDC though, to have the default power mode set to the lowest one on consumer gaming consoles just because average people won't know to switch it to low power mode and the fact that there are so many consoles in households.
BTW I'm one of those energy hogs that runs his Xbox One so that upgrades can happen in the background.
Energy use while gaming is one thing, and we can argue about it. But energy use when the system is in standby is pretty different, since it provides small/negligible benefit and really adds up when the system is plugged in 24 hours/day.
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Boy, the NRDC's going to have a fit when they start looking at the computers with kilowatt power supplies with graphics cards that draw over 300W and CPUs that draw over 100W while gaming.
I agree with the NRDC though, to have the default power mode set to the lowest one on consumer gaming consoles just because average people won't know to switch it to low power mode and the fact that there are so many consoles in households.
BTW I'm one of those energy hogs that runs his Xbox One so that upgrades can happen in the background.
Energy use while gaming is one thing, and we can argue about it. But energy use when the system is in standby is pretty different, since it provides small/negligible benefit and really adds up when the system is plugged in 24 hours/day.
I agree... the first part was meant more of as a joke, hence the winky face after it.
But definitely the "idle" draw of a gaming computer is effectively nil since most people actually turn off their gaming rigs when not in use. But if I use my gaming rig to browse the internet with all my monitors on, it draws around 150W (as measured from my UPS.)
Edit: Changed to "effectively nil" because even when off, modern PC motherboards still draw some non-zero amount of power through the power supply.
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Most computers boot with their CPUs running at their fastest non-TurboBoost (or similar) speed. Once the OS assumes control, it will then enable downclocking to save power.
True for other components as well-- spinning rust drives need the most power during spinup; and most desktop computers spin up their fans to full speed at power-on or hard reboot, and then let them slow down once the BIOS/EFI is sure they are rotating or after the OS or a fan management utility takes over.
It's easily visible with a Kill-A-Watt, although there is a huge difference between the peak boot load and the desktop standby load seen on a gaming PC, an HTC/router PC, a Mac Mini, or a laptop.
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What in the world is the device doing with all that power?
To put this in perspective, my entire 2015 MacBook Pro uses around 12-13W while I'm using it do to light workloads. That means the screen is on and it's actually computing stuff with some regularity.
So what are these XBoxes doing, other than the occasional software update?
To put this in perspective, my entire 2015 MacBook Pro uses around 12-13W while I'm using it do to light workloads. That means the screen is on and it's actually computing stuff with some regularity.
So what are these XBoxes doing, other than the occasional software update?
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But that could be addressed in a different way. If the console could power up every evening and check for updates, install them and power down again, you would get the same benefit with a fraction of the power consumption.
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No! I want to rationalize away the cost of my lazy selfishness, and it’s hard if you keep pointing it out with articles like this!
Nya!
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Is that the best story we can come up with today?
This is one of those GIGANTIC NUMBER BAD stories that serves to defeat the entire point of environmental conservation, because it makes it sound like the best solutions are annoying, pointless, or even trivially simple...
Sure, there are many better and inexpensive things you could do to lower your carbon footprint by >$10 a year. Replace your weatherstripping, fix that leaky thing, replace that ancient appliance... But the big picture is the source of the energy.
I fully understand that running an Xbox on standby costs me ~$10 a year. I'm not going to go in to the "usefulness" of the heat - but it's also not worthless. Paying $10 a year to have my $60 game up-to-date during the 1-2 hours I actually get to play, on my $500+ console... Irrelevant beyond irrelevant to me.
This is one of those GIGANTIC NUMBER BAD stories that serves to defeat the entire point of environmental conservation, because it makes it sound like the best solutions are annoying, pointless, or even trivially simple...
Sure, there are many better and inexpensive things you could do to lower your carbon footprint by >$10 a year. Replace your weatherstripping, fix that leaky thing, replace that ancient appliance... But the big picture is the source of the energy.
I fully understand that running an Xbox on standby costs me ~$10 a year. I'm not going to go in to the "usefulness" of the heat - but it's also not worthless. Paying $10 a year to have my $60 game up-to-date during the 1-2 hours I actually get to play, on my $500+ console... Irrelevant beyond irrelevant to me.
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Seems like you’ve had a rough day (or week).
A perspective where this is not a convenience: some folks don’t have fast internet. If a 11GB update needs to apply before you can play, that’s close ~3 hours of waiting if you’re rocking an “okay” 8mbps.
From a CO2 standpoint, two(-ish) gallons of gas is equal in carbon terms to about a year’s worth of power consumption for this standby feature.
I think we have bigger fish to fry and lambasting folks for this is (likely) counter-productive. Encouraging them to be aware and make informed choices? Totally. Want them to make the decision efficiently? Carbon tax.
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Sure, installing weather stripping would be better, but how much effort does that take per user?
The effort for changing a default option in distributed firmware that would instantly result in saving Megawatts per year is negligible and in addition it would not require users to lift a finger.
Again, as others have stated, the actions aren't mutually exclusive. You *can* do both and doing one doesn't prevent you from doing the other.
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Stochastic
Ars Scholae Palatinae
I should have been more clear. I was questioning the second statement ("Boot up with any frequency and you loose all benefits of being off in the first place") and not so much the first ("Devices like computers tend to use the most power when booting up").
A modern PC can boot up in less than two minutes, and an Xbox in about 1 minute. Even if the device were at max load for this entire period (which it's not as you point out), it would still probably use orders of magnitude less total energy during this brief period than it does idling for hours on end. So turning off your device if you aren't going to be using it for a few hours results in a net energy savings. It's the same logic as to why it's worth turning off your car if you're going to be idling for more than 30 seconds.
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This is a good question. I tried rooting around for some consumption figures when in S3 suspend-to-RAM, and came across this:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Pow ... _295260754
This indicates that even a 2013-era dual-socket Xeon server used less power in S3 than this Xbox. You'd think instant-on should be similar to suspend-to-RAM, but 10-13W feels more like the system is actually fully running, just the CPU/GPU are down-clocked.
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Stochastic
Ars Scholae Palatinae
The difference is that one company (Microsoft) could easily push out a firmware update that would reduce the power draw of millions of devices. Whereas there's no easy way to get millions of people to replace their weatherstripping, etc. Yes, the gains are minuscule compared to bigger things like insulating homes, but it's also much, much easier to make this change.
EDIT: ninja'd by bbf
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Normally people never change a default... except in one case. That default causes them an annoyance.
NRDC has a point, but gamers tend to be a very .. ahem .. opinionated group of people. It's not about the 15 seconds saved on boot. It's that the other way means several minutes of wait on a significant fraction of boots when people just want to play a game for a while thanks to yet another firmware update. The number one complaint I hear from Xbox folks is that it seems like every time they want to turn the system on to play a game, it wants to update the firmware which can take any where from a few minutes to much longer.
What are a significant fraction of gamers going to do as soon as they find out how to get around that? Change the setting back to the one NRDC is complaining about, and no amount of warning is going to make them care.
The real answer, if someone were to ask me, would be to set a default automatic wake-up time for firmware updates sometime in the early hours of the morning, user settable with a random fudge factor so all the ones in the Pacific TZ don't wake at once for example. The console, wakes up, checks for updates, fetches, installs, and goes back to sleep. Update checking is otherwise disabled till next check in unless there's a severe security problem which is easy to signal without performing a client side check. Reasonable environmental advocates are satisfied. Users are generally satisfied. And updates are performed at off hours both for electricity use and ISP data use.
NRDC has a point, but gamers tend to be a very .. ahem .. opinionated group of people. It's not about the 15 seconds saved on boot. It's that the other way means several minutes of wait on a significant fraction of boots when people just want to play a game for a while thanks to yet another firmware update. The number one complaint I hear from Xbox folks is that it seems like every time they want to turn the system on to play a game, it wants to update the firmware which can take any where from a few minutes to much longer.
What are a significant fraction of gamers going to do as soon as they find out how to get around that? Change the setting back to the one NRDC is complaining about, and no amount of warning is going to make them care.
The real answer, if someone were to ask me, would be to set a default automatic wake-up time for firmware updates sometime in the early hours of the morning, user settable with a random fudge factor so all the ones in the Pacific TZ don't wake at once for example. The console, wakes up, checks for updates, fetches, installs, and goes back to sleep. Update checking is otherwise disabled till next check in unless there's a severe security problem which is easy to signal without performing a client side check. Reasonable environmental advocates are satisfied. Users are generally satisfied. And updates are performed at off hours both for electricity use and ISP data use.
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Every standalone gaming console is required to perform double-duty as a pizza box warmer...
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Why not some sort of middle ground - keep it off in most cases, with a scheduled task set by Microsoft to update during non-use periods, gathered by logging uptimes? It could be set to not activate the TV, I would surmise. It then powers off when updates are complete.
Microsoft could use this for load balancing purposes as well, to keep up transfer rates. It doesn't seem like an all-or-nothing approach is even necessary for this issue.
Edit: ninja'd by A Very Tired Geek.
Microsoft could use this for load balancing purposes as well, to keep up transfer rates. It doesn't seem like an all-or-nothing approach is even necessary for this issue.
Edit: ninja'd by A Very Tired Geek.
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By comparison, my M1 Mac Mini, sitting idle at the desktop (no UI apps running but not sleeping) consumes about 5W, according to the kill-a-watt.
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Alt
NRDC: Default Series S/X option responsible for people not moving much and saving billions in CO2 emissions in 1 year
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People like that would still be able to toggle the setting from OFF to ON.
The problem is that 99% of people won't ever look at the setting, even if most of them would be fine with it set to OFF.
If Microsoft just changes the default setting from ON to OFF it will save billions of kWh, and those who want it ON will still have that option.
That is, make the power sucking be opt-IN not opt-out.
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If it boots that fast? Of course not! In any case it almost certainly pulls 80-90% of its power supply rating (≈250W ? ), and only during a portion of the boot up.
Assume a computer takes 1 minute to boot up, and you do so twice a day.
Are you really saying that during its normal boot is uses 72000% as much power as during normal running? That'd do more than dim the lights
* 24hrs x 60min/hr / 2
Edit 2: galaxy level reading comprehension Fail on my part.
Edit: I missed that the article says 15 seconds saved, so you are completely correct.
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The author already put it in perspective by stating the average dollar cost per year, and everyone in the US already understands dollars.
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I work from rising to sleeping all day long seven days a week. My job is writing. I do it all the time. I don't mind waiting for my computer to start up, or have it notify me that when I shut it down it'll apply updates. I turn it off at night, and turn it on in the morning.
That's the way it should be done. Which was the point of my post. And that doesn't mean you can't wander into the play room and fire the thing up a few minutes before you start playing so it's all ready for you. I mean, planning is part of living a full life. It may seem trivial to you, but having a device defaulted to suit YOUR lifestyle is, as I said, complete fucking bullshit, mostly because your lifestyle is so much of an outlier that if the gaming console manufacturers changed the paradigm so that the console would work like a computer, 99.999999% of the gaming population wouldn't give a shit, and it would save a shit-ton of carbon release.
That they're catering to YOUR lifestyle is why the carbon release is so high.
I don't think you make a great case for your preferences being applied to the gaming console industry.
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One imagines that that is exactly what the Xbox should be doing, rapidly switching between idle (almost no power draw), and some fully-on state (more power than the average). The instantaneous power isn’t important, just the average.
In any case none of this explains why checking for updates would cost this much. Perhaps it never idles, so they can leave the mic/speech processing active or something?
Edit: apparently occasionally checking didn’t mean “every fifteen seconds”. I misunderstood, badly. Mea culpa.
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I mean, that's not true. The benefit is not just for the few seconds of startup, the primary reason for using instant on is so that your games and system update themselves in the background so that they're always ready to play.
Coming home after work to game with your friends, only to find a 4GB system update that's going to take 4 hours to download is a really shitty experience and what the Instant On mode aims to solve.
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And that option would still be there, just as opt-in not opt-out.
Save a billion kWh with one OS update to change the default to OFF, and those with DSL can still cope just by going to settings to change it to ON.
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I'm just saying let's be honest with what we're discussing, because we're not talking about sacrificing *just* a few seconds.
It's noble that everyone cares this much about 0.78% of a household's summer energy usage, but there's orders of magnitude bigger fish to fry. Like I said, turn your thermostat down a degree, you'll save orders of magnitude more and you'll notice the difference less.
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Semi-related: I found out this week thanks to this video that my El Cheapo Vick's humidifier can draw 200W at full tilt, which was a giant surprise to me. I bought a whole-home model last week anyway, and it covers more area while using less power, and the energy savings will pay for itself in a couple months.
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