ich zitiere auch extra für unseren Umweltschützer mal folgende Passage:
What surprised Mills wasn’t that PCs and consoles were guzzling refrigerators’ worth of power, though. Mills says the more impending threat is cloud gaming.
Cloud gaming shuttles input signals from a mobile gamer’s couch to a far-away data center equipped with top-of-the-line CPUs and GPUs, where a new game state is calculated and transmitted back. Because much of the processing happens remotely, so too does the bulk of the energy use. (Some, of course, still happens locally.) In addition to energy-intensive hardware demands, data centers depend on substantial ventilation and air cooling.
“You can think of the data center as a factory: Electricity and water go in, and data and heat go out,” says Aaron Wemhoff, director of Villanova University’s Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems. “While adding IT equipment adds to electricity consumption, the focus on energy efficiency is to minimize the extra electricity required to make up for cooling systems and electrical power losses.”
Cloud gaming
uses more energy per hour of gameplay than local gaming, which means data centers are taxed regardless of the console people play on. Microsoft, which runs its own Azure data centers,
is pushing hard to convert its facilities to renewable energy. Wemhoff says that while he is seeing more data center operators express interest in moving in that direction, progress has been slow. “Industry members have told me there is little financial incentive to drive this change,” he says.