

When the first preliminary report on next-generation console energy use came out in December, we highlighted the fact that Sony and Microsoft might both be able to substantially improve their performance in short order. Fast forward five months, and the National Resources Defense Council has released an updated version of its report with more historical information and a full set of estimates for how much power each console consumes. Is Microsoft still the power-hungry elephant in the room?

In a word, yes. But there’s some very interesting additional information on why that’s so — and some baffling issues with current console power consumption. First, let’s look at the table for the PS4, Xbox One, and Wii U:

Console power

This chart shows the power consumption of all three consoles in their various operating modes. The PS4 is obviously far head of the Xbox One in all categories — so why is MS losing the annual power consumption race? Two reasons: First, it draws almost 2x the power of the PS4 in standby mode, which is where the consoles will spend the vast majority of their time. Second, if operated in the MS-recommended TV mode, it means you’re powering up the Xbox One console just to watch television. In that mode, the console chews through 72W of power.

Streaming power consumption

The NRDC is, I think, right to point a finger at just how much power these consoles use for simple tasks — but is it a function of AMD’s engineering? Our tests suggest not. We’ve got an A4-5000 Kabini whitebook on-hand from AMD — this is a system that runs a custom BIOS and doesn’t appear to be particularly aggressively power-optimized. It also includes a 1920×1080 screen, so our wall power measurements include the cost of driving the display as well. Total power consumption for the entire laptop while decoding H.264 1080p video? About 15W with the display at maximum brightness and 11W with the display at half brightness.

While the Xbox One and PS4 obviously contain a great deal of custom logic and much larger GPUs, even the Wii U draws more than 2x the power of our mobile Kabini. If we assume a headless A4-5000 could decode H.264 at 7-8W, the new consoles are drawing 4x – 10x as much power to handle essentially the same task.

On the other hand, there’s still reason to be optimistic. The chart below shows how game console power consumption has tended to improve over each generation as new console flavors are released.

Console power consumption

Note that both the PS4 and Xbox One come in well below the launch consoles for the PS3 and Xbox 360. There’s room for improvement, but these designs are more power-efficient than their predecessors were at a similar stage of development.

Should you care how much power your console uses?

The NRDC reports always leave me of two minds. On the one hand, it’s never a bad idea to look at the energy efficiency of the devices you purchase, particularly if you’re a heavy TV watcher and want an Xbox One. There’s no particular reason why an HDMI pass-through requires 72W of power. Similarly, the PS4’s connected stand-by power is either 3W or 8.5W depending on whether or not you enable USB charging — regardless of whether a device is currently charging or not.

What’s the value of that 5.5W? To a person with a PS4 on 24/7/365, about $8.67 a year at 18 cents per kWh. Of course, multiply that times a few million PS4s over a few years, and you’ve got a fair amount of money. The National Resources Defense Council tries at several points to compare total power usage to major cities or multilple power plants, but precious few Americans are going to be convinced that because millions of consoles add up to significant power consumption over several years, they should modify their behavior now.

But one thing that stands out is that it definitely should be possible to improve these positions — and for that reason alone, it’s worth doing. Less power consumption means less system noise, and less power spent cooling that heat. Thus far, Sony and MS haven’t improved the situation  — hopefully such updates are on the way later this year.