Comment by cassianoleal
2 months ago
> better performance is due to more efficient use of hardware, which comes at an energy cost
It's a matter of balance.
More efficiency means less power for the same computations. If you increase the computations more than your gain in performance, you use more power. If your efficiency gains are not fully utilised by increased computations, you use less power.
What I was getting at was that if you have a CPU bottleneck, reducing or removing that bottleneck can make your GPU work harder, which results in more frames per second but also more energy because GPU isn't idle as much.
This would be in contrast to say wasting a lot of cycles in a spin lock due to thread contention, where reducing or removing the contention might gain you both performance and lower energy cost due to less waste.