Hello,<p>I was wondering : for two equivalent applications , one desktop and the other cloud/sass. Which may be the more energy performant. All other things being equal obvisouly.<p>My guess is :
As a cloud application always need a client and as applications' front ends nowadays tend to more and more have CPU heay use : Cloud Application will use the same energy amount on client side than a desktop app plus the server side energy.<p>Yes, I must admint that there is surely some bad faith for the client side energy use of a cloud application..
It depends on how fast the data you use gets outdated. If its constantly changing and being updated cloud is going to be more efficient.<p>But if its like Wikipedia or Stackoverflow which you can download entire copies off and run on your local system as an app using Kiwix, the local app will be much more efficient since the majority of the data is not changing much. I have a local copy of Wikipedia that is 3 years old via Kiwix and I haven't visited the online Wikipedia since (all request just go to my local app).
What kind of data would you require to get a convincing statistical answer for this?<p>(bearing in mind that there are many different applications, operating systems, and desktop/laptop/server machines)<p>It's a good question. Like you, I guess cloud-based applications may be less energy efficient overall; not all energy has an equal environmental production cost, however. And hopefully WebAssembly and other technologies can improve web application efficiency.