Trent Loos explores energy use, economic impact and research comparing the human brain to modern supercomputers.

Every couple of years, a new generation of computer processors is launched. For a long time, CPUs seemed to stick to the same level of power, whereas GPUs only increased by a relatively small amount.

With today's enthusiast and gaming PCs using more energy than at any other time in history, you might be looking to see how you can measure the amount of power your machine is consuming. This ...