Xbox's 'Instant On' Feature Could Consume 4 Billion kWh By 2025 (arstechnica.com) 104
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The "instant on" feature that's activated by default on new Xbox Series S/X consoles could suck up a total of 4 billion kWh -- the equivalent of a year's operation for a large power plant -- from US owners alone through 2025. That's according to a preliminary report released this week from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmentally focused nonprofit advocacy group. As the name implies, the "instant on" feature of the Series S/X (and the Xbox One before it) lets users skip the usual startup time when turning the console back on. That saves about 10 to 15 seconds of waiting per power cycle on the Series S/X, down from about 45 seconds on the Xbox One.
"Instant on" standby also lets the system check periodically for system updates in order to download and install them in between play sessions. But leaving the "instant on" feature active means the Xbox Series S/X draws nine to 10 watts of power 24 hours a day -- even when it's not being actively used -- compared to less than 1W if the standby settings are switched to "energy saving" mode. The Xbox Series S/X initially drew 25 to 28W of "instant on" standby power at launch, but a recent firmware update caused a dramatic reduction, placing the new systems below the ~13W drawn by the Xbox One's "instant on" mode. The PlayStation 5, by contrast, uses between 1 and 2 watts when sitting idle in "rest mode."
"Instant on" standby also lets the system check periodically for system updates in order to download and install them in between play sessions. But leaving the "instant on" feature active means the Xbox Series S/X draws nine to 10 watts of power 24 hours a day -- even when it's not being actively used -- compared to less than 1W if the standby settings are switched to "energy saving" mode. The Xbox Series S/X initially drew 25 to 28W of "instant on" standby power at launch, but a recent firmware update caused a dramatic reduction, placing the new systems below the ~13W drawn by the Xbox One's "instant on" mode. The PlayStation 5, by contrast, uses between 1 and 2 watts when sitting idle in "rest mode."
The Good Old Days (Score:5, Insightful)
Xbox Series S/X draws nine to 10 watts of power 24 hours a day -- even when it's not being actively used -- compared to less than 1W if the standby settings are switched to "energy saving" mode...
I'm old enough to remember when you could turn devices off. An energy saving mode that uses 0 watts- imagine that!
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Re:The Good Old Days (Score:5, Interesting)
For a while I had all my home entertainment stuff on a powerstrip with a builtin timer, so between 1am and 4pm nothing drew any power (on weekdays. On weekends it would wake up at 8am), but now I'd be worried about how it would deal with sudden power loss. Not so easy to reinstall xbox-os if the drive gets corrupt
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I hate the ones that does autoupdates overnight though and can't be disabled.
Re:The Good Old Days (Score:5, Insightful)
You can do that still. You can even have a remote control for it if you want.
Remote controlled power strips for this exact purpose have been a thing for a while now.
Home Depot (Score:2)
I don't know if they still have them, probably, but a few years ago they had cheap remote plug two outlet ones for $5 around Christmas. I got two, one for the tree, but they can be very useful for other things as well.
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You can do that still. You can even have a remote control for it if you want.
Remote controlled power strips for this exact purpose have been a thing for a while now.
Isn't there some option that lets you turn devices of without lifting your hand? Lifting your hand is still too much effort.
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Use your nose to control the switch/touchscreen. Hands free.
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Yes, smart power plugs do exist and if you have a smart speaker you can control them with your voice.
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And you could turn them on and off without a lengthy startup and shutdown routine. They were either on and ready or completely off right away.
Re: The Good Old Days (Score:3)
Not on only did those devices turn off completely, they also turned on instantly. Today, in the age of complexity and towers of abstraction, it takes a long time to start those devices, hence "instant on" actually means "never off". Itâ(TM)s a simulated instant on.
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You don't remember the old TVs that took a while to warm up the tubes?
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Vaguely. I do remember my grandpa's black and white TV in which the picture on the CRT was smaller when first turned on, but still viewable. The TV in our house was color and I'm sure transistor based, and it didn't have an "always ON" mode since even the remote only had an OFF button, but no ON button - the ON button was only physically on the TV.
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When I turn my Commodore 64 off, it's off. No hidden background activity there. And the best part is that it boots up in a second.
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ROFL. See if any contemporary console can run on 64KB or RAM+ROM. The answer of course is no, and it never will. I used to work on a fairly popular (amongst embedded folks) RTOS, which could boot in under 4KB or RAM. We used to sell a graphical automotive UI in 2 versions, RTOS requiring a single core and 1MB or RAM, and a Linux version, which looked identical, which requires a quad core + 1GB or RAM. Same framework, you can recompile into RTOS or Linux. All customer but one chose Linux, even though it mean
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The reason is that games for those consoles now need more than that, because pretty graphics, and wanting to push beyond arbitrary limits that would otherwise be stopped at 64K. I recently played AI War 2, that game likes tracking around 500+ units at once just for one faction and there's enough variables that you'd slam against 64K even with a compressed data structure.
Some of the later devices also be
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is unplugging at the power point still a thing - or are you lazy?
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consider.
xbox would have to sell those xboxes first
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Re:all greek to me (Score:4)
They probably chose the one that is most commonly used and not the less used one some people are clinging desperately to.
Except that nobody is clinging to it [wikipedia.org].
All English-speaking countries use "billion" to mean 1e9 and "trillion" to mean 1e12.
The terms mean different things in other languages, but nobody should expect words to have the same meaning in a different language.
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Nobody uses long scale billions. Even the UK stopped 50 years ago.
Partially useful (Score:4)
I don't particularly care about 1s vs 45s startup, but I do like the idea of it automatically handling updates while idle. Seems like it could be set up to wake up at 2am, pull updates, and go back to sleep, though.
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Yep, and talking about automatic updates, any idea how much power that costs?
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The updates have to be installed at some point regardless; is there any measurable difference in power consumption whether it happens automatically at night or when you want to play a game?
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Apparently automatic updates are possible in the energy saving mode.
FTA:
[Update: A Microsoft spokesperson clarifies that "if the console is in energy saving mode with automatic updates enabled, the console will wake, check for updates and download them during the maintenance window (if available), shutting down again after the download completes. This occurs once every 24 hours. If the console is in energy saving mode but the user has opted for automatic updates to be disabled, the console will only check for or download updates when the user manually does so from My Games & Apps."]
Word (Score:3)
thanks but no thanks (Score:3)
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And you're view is the reason why the human race is screwed. Dave the planet, go green, electric cars, insulate, ... Instead we get someone who can't even stand spare 30 seconds. Despite the fact those 30 seconds can be a background talk between going to get your controller a can of coke and sitting your arse down.
If it didn't disproportionately affect the poor of be all for a 100% tax on electricity.
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Re: thanks but no thanks (Score:2)
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If you think the planet is screwed because people are willing to waste a trivial amount of energy to save some time then your logical reasoning skills are as poor as your typing
My typing is fine, just autocorrect doing it's wonderful work.
You don't seem to see what wasting trivial energy represents. It's a continuous stack that makes the USA one of the highest per capita emitters in the world.
It's okay, it's just 10w in the Xbox it doesn't cost me much. Replacing that lightbulb only saves a trivial amount. My old fridge is fine it's not that much power either. I don't need a new car my current one works and petrol is cheap so I don't save much.
Taking a single plane flight you didn't need will have more impact over a lifetime than this
Plane flights are not completely wast
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That's why the only way to solve this is regulation. The cost to the individual is small but the cost of everyone doing it is high.
Context (Score:3, Interesting)
And the US will have consumed 19,947,830,000,000 kWh by 2025 (based on the current annual power consumption). 4 billion kWh is only 0.1% of that. Even that sounds like a ludicrously high estimate. Xboxes consume 0.1% of all US power? This article is just silly nonsense.
Re:Context (Score:4, Informative)
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Still too fucking high when you consider it's just a fucking game console.
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A typical household consumes an average of about 1000W. The 10W Xbox consumption would increase a household's electricity usage by about 1%.
If 5% of US households get an Xbox, that would increase total residential electrical use by .05%, so considering non-residential usage isn't affected, the sibling post's correction of .02% overall looks about right to me.
At any rate, it could be much worse. Back in the early 1970s, our family had a big instant-on vacuum tube color TV set. You could peer inside the large
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At the moment it is winter, so if a standby device is not drawing power, then your heater is.
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Electrical resistance heat costs several times that of gas heat. One reason for this is that due to the laws of thermodynamics, for every joule of electrical energy delivered to your house, 2 to 3 joules of fuel have to be consumed at the power plant.
Also, part of the year is summer. If you have to turn on the air conditioner, you'll use an additional ~30% electricity to pump the standby heat out of your house.
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You better call Hydro-Ontario and Hydro-Québec, I don't think they're aware that they need fuel to generate electricity.
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The environmental disasters called dams only generate a single-digit percentage of North American electricity. It can safely be ignored.
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That's only equivalent for people using electric radiant heat. A heat pump or a gas furnace uses much less electricity for equivalent heat output.
One million dollars (Score:2)
It's based on Dr. Evil's innumeracy in demanding a random of "one million dollars", which wasn't that large a number if you are talking about destroying the entire world with an Evil Superweapon, even back in the 60's when he was frozen?
I'm getting old and forgetful (Score:2)
and I need a new pair of reading glasses, you ignorant clod!
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The number may be nonsense but the idea of burning the equivalent of leaving a light on 24/7 for the simple reason of a slightly faster wake time is the reason the human race is screwed.
LED clocks on stoves and microwaves (Score:1)
are totally responsible for climate change.
More than a desktop or laptop? (Score:3)
Don't see why this has to be so high. Laptops use 1-2 W in sleep mode and desktops 1-5 W.
Re:More than a desktop or laptop? (Score:4, Informative)
My desktop draws 10W in suspend mode, you insensitive clod! I've measured it. FX-8350, 16GB RAM, 2xGTX 950 AMP!, 1 SSD, 1 additional 2-port GigE card. Yes, it's an old potato. But it still runs games OK.
My low clock-speed i5 desktop (Score:4, Interesting)
uses 7.5 W running "flat out" and somehow I get work done.
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I'm sure you do. I have a Ryzen 3 laptop where its peak including charging is under 45W, haven't measured it. That's great when I need a low-power device. But it doesn't play games worth a crap.
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Yeah, I can absolutely nail my laptop (e.g. benchmark it) and it doesn't use battery. It also doesn't do very well in the graphics department, although you can run older games on it like MC if you sacrifice detail. That's not why I bought it anyway, but my desktop was in storage for a while and I needed something low-power.
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Most people do not run potatoes in suspend mode. The majority of people who use their computers enough to care about fast startups have a modern pc with modern energy efficient capabilities.
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Most people do not run potatoes in suspend mode.
Is that true? IME most people have older PCs. Among home users, only serious gamers are always updating, because potatoes are capable of doing what most people want to do these days. My PC is still seriously quick for day to day tasks, only really hardcore stuff is compromised.
non-story (Score:1)
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Someone should to the math, and figure out the billions of seconds saved every year by XBox owners who left the instant on feature turned on. I'll bet that it adds up to several lifetime's worth.
My old school XBox One takes a solid minute and a half to boot up, so you better believe that I left that feature turned on.
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Wait until they're running full blast on idle (Score:3)
Either for a new cryptocurrency, or a microsoft-run distributed supercomputer.
Out of how many kWh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not kidding here. Back in the 60s/70s we could always tell what room my youngest sister had been in because she had an aversion to turning off the light. In her mind the switch went up but never went down.
/ heh, she turns 59 in 10 days
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If it's 10% the kWh used then, yeah, it's an issue. If it's 0.000001% then, well, whatever. If you want to pay $0.25 per month for always on that's fine by me, especially if you can make your teenage daughter turn off the lights when she leaves a room.
Nowadays, a 10W led bulb is enough to light up a room. So the 13W Xbox uses is like never switching off the lights in one room.
Is that a big deal? Obviously not. But is that bad compared to their competitor? Most definitely. The 1-2W PS5 draws is like leaving one room's lights on for 2.5 hours a day. I.e., if you played the PS5 for 2 hours a days in the evenings, your room's light while you play used as much power as your PS5 used during the other 22 hours in rest mode.
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Yep and that's the reason why we are screwed. No thought of pointless energy waste, just straight to a "pay $0.25 for faster startup time, I'm down for that!".
I wonder what it would take to convince you to switch to an electric car if you can't even stop burning 10w continuously just to shave a few irrelevant second off your startup time..
Feds Should Step In (Score:3)
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Come on people, we are only borrowing it from our kids.
Just a thought...
Those of us who don't have kids are a} not borrowing it from our kids and b} having an incalculably smaller impact on the environment long-term than those who do.
Childless couples: the ultimate environmentalists.
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Europe and Japan have appliance standby laws (Score:5, Interesting)
Always on, means power supplies age (Score:2)
Not really. The lifetime is largely set by the electrolytic capacitors (presuming competent design of the rest of it), due evaporation of electrolyte past seals. That is proportional to temperature, and negligable at room temperature which where they'll be on standby.
Sounds Like Modern Standby on Windows 10 (Score:1)
I got a new gaming laptop a few months ago. When idle, it consumes 22 Watts of power. When I put it to "sleep", it consumes 20 Watts. It also turns off the fans, so after a few hours, the laptop is burning hot. There is no way to disable modern standby, so now I have to hibernate or shutoff my computer. Waking up from hibernate takes much, much longer than my old laptop took coming out of sleep mode. Only with Microsoft would we go backwards.
It is the users' choice (Score:2)
I clearly remember being asked about this mode while setting up my console.
On one hand, yes, I can choose to do a complete shutdown.
Or, I can choose to spend some idle power and have auto updates, remote access, and instant on.
Yes, 10W is not trivial, however it is not wasted.
Obvious solution (Score:1)
The Xbox One is an oven in this mode (Score:2)
I was wondering why there was always so much heat in one area of the living room, especially in the summer. My Xbox One was in its suspend mode, and it was pumping out heat like I couldn't believe! After that I always turned it completely off.
Vampire power (Score:2)
Why is Microsoft so bad at power saving? (Score:2)
When I put my iMac to sleep, it consumes less than a watt. It wakes up instantly.
What the hell is Apple doing that Microsoft seems incapable of doing? And this has been a problem with MS stuff for a while now.
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theirs a price to pay when your PC costs 5 times less then a crapple product
Wasteful I know, but... (Score:1)
But but but... (Score:1)
Xbox is already a waste of power.
Cost more than anything (Score:1)
Toobin (Score:2)
So it's not instant on so much as never off.
Instant on TVs back in the tube days (and I mean glowing vacuum tubes) kept a few of those tubes glowing a sweet orange all the time.