alt Hacker NewsA random, funny, interesting and telling data point: my MacBook M3 Max while DS4 is generating tokens at full speed peaks 50W of energy usage...
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It's so interesting to think about how much power it takes these machines to "think". I think I had a vague notion that it was "a lot" but it's good to put a number on it.
If DS4 Flash peaks at 50W and is 280B parameters, does that mean DS4 Pro at 1.6T parameters would likely be 300W or so? And the latest GPT 5 and Opus which feel maybe comparable-ish around 500W? Is it fair to say that when I'm using Claude Code and it's "autofellating" or whatever I'm burning 500W in a datacenter somewhere during that time?
Not everybody might realize this, but this is a truly excellent and very impressive result. Most models on my M4 Max run at 150W consumption.
That a serious number? By the way, how does a hardware normie like me even measure this?
equals 2 or 3 human brains in power usage. Amazing work!
I think I’ve seen about 60 watt total system whenever I’ve used a local model on a MacBook Pro or a Mac Studio. Baseline for the Mac Studio is like 10 W and like 6 W for the MacBook Pro.
"Data centers for LLMs are technically more energy efficient per-user than self-hosting LLM models due to economies-of-scale" is a data point the internet isn't ready for.