Second Life avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

A few weeks ago I saw an estimate by Russel Seitz of how much cyberspace weighs. (Two ounces, if you're interested.) Now, Nick Carr (author of Does IT Matter?, which I've written about here and here) calculates that a Second Life avatar consumes as much electricity as a Brazilian:

If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars "living" in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars' physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals... 60,000 kilowatt-hours....

Which, annualized, gives us [an average avatar consumption of] 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year..... [T]he average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.

Which means, in turn, that avatars aren't quite as intangible as they seem. They don't have bodies, but they do leave footprints.

From Mark Baard via Tim Bray.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, energy, games

Comments

[rektide]

1) that avatar cpu usage is just a fraction of the game world dynamics. doubling the avatars will not double your power consumption.

2) 200 watts per server seems a little hyperactive. i googled for stats, but my understanding is linden labs uses cheap off the shelf pcs. most of the processing is cpu, not disk. unless they're using egregious power hog cpu's (amd's had a bunch of 125watt thermal envelope cpu's across the years) or have an array of disks in each machine, i cant see how you could even peak to 200watts consumption. no gpu, no peripherials, just cpu motherboard and ram. 150 is reasonable for a non-power-optimized system.

3) huge server farms often buy power efficient parts. my dual athlon server has dual 35watt cpus. going with energy efficient processors can save enormously over the long run. amd's 3800 x2 EE is a shining example of this; a modern dual core system that consumes net of under 100watts. a bit too modern for SL, but i'm sure they took some steps setting up their cluster.

4) given the reduced power consumption i've already described, 50 watts for cooling seems... excessive.

[David D.]

On the other hand, this estimate does NOT include the power consumed in the location of the user of the avatar who is also running her own computer and monitor (and air conditioning and lights that she wouldn't need to run if she went outside to the park). So let's throw in an additional, say, 2500 kWh per year for that (I'm figuring, conservatively, 300 watts per hour on the user's side).

Then again, those users (myself included) would probably still be sitting in front of their computers even if Second Life didn't exist, so no harm done, I suppose.