On 2019-12-18 20:06 CET, Rod Beck wrote:
I was reasoning from the analogy that an incandescent bulb is less efficient than a LED bulb because more it generates more heat - more of the electricity goes into the infrared spectrum than the useful visible spectrum. Similar to the way that an electric motor is more efficient than a combustion engine.
Still, you should not look at how much heat you get, but how much utility you get. Which for a lighting source would be measured in lumens within the visible spectrum. If you put in 300 watt of electricity into a computer server, you will get somewhere between 290 and 299 watts of heat from the server itself. The second largest power output will be the kinetic energy of the air the fans in the server pushes; I'm guestimating that to be somewhere between 1 and 10 watts (and thus my uncertainty of the direct heat output above). Then you get maybe 0.1 watts of sound energy (noise) and other vibrations in the rack. And finally, less than 0.01 watts of light in the network fibers from the server (assuming dual 40G or dual 100G network connections, i.e. 8 lasers). Every microwatt of electricity put into the server in order to toggle bits, keeping bits at their current value, transporting bits within and between CPU, RAM, motherboard, disks, and so on, will turn into heat *before* leaving the server. The only exception being the light put into the network fibers, and that will be less than 10 milliwatts for a server. All inefficiencies in power supplies, power regulators, fans, and other stuff in the server, will become heat, within the server. So your estimate of 60% heat, i.e. 40% *non*-heat, is off by at least a factor ten. And the majority of the kinetic energy of the air pushed by the server will have turned into heat after just a few meters... So, if you look at how much heat is given off by a server compared to how much power is put into it, then it is 99.99% inefficient. :-) But that's just the wrong way to look at it. In a lighting source, you can measure the amount of visible light given off in watts. In an engine (electrical, combustion or other- wise), you can measure the amount of output in watts. So in those cases, efficiency can be measured in percent, as the input and the output are measured in the same units (watts). But often a light source is better measured in lumens, not watts. Sometimes, the torque, measured in Newton-meters, is more relevant for an engine. Or thrust, measured in Newtons, for a rocket engine. Then, dividing the input (W) with the output (lm, Nm, N) does not give a percentage. Similarly, the relevant output of a computer is not measured in watts, but in FLOPS, database transactions/second, or web pages served per hour. Basically, the only time the amount of heat given off by a computer is relevant, is when you are designing and dimensioning the cooling system. And then the answer is always "exactly as much as the power you put *into* the computer". :-) /Bellman