Steve Lohr's NY Times blog highlighted our work on trends in computing efficiency today
I chatted with Steve Lohr of the NY Times yesterday about the implications of the last six decades of progress in computing efficiency, and his blog today reflects our conversation nicely. He also talked about my new book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs, which will be released on February 15, 2012, which gives some examples of why those trends are so powerful and important.
Here’s the intro to the blog post:
A New ‘Law’ for the Mobile Computing Era
The new gadgetry at the International Consumer Electronics Show this week owes a lot to the crisp articulation of ever-increasing computer performance known as Moore’s Law. First proclaimed in 1965 by Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore, it says that the number of transistors that can be put on a microchip doubles about every two years.
But a new descriptive formulation that focuses on energy use seems especially apt these days. So much of the excitement and product innovation today centers on battery-powered, mobile computing — smartphones, tablets, and a host of devices based on digital sensors, like personal health monitors that track vital signs and calorie-burn rates. And the impact of low-power sensor-based computing is evident well beyond the consumer market.
The trend in energy efficiency that has opened the door to the increasing spread of mobile computing is being called Koomey’s Law. It states that the amount of power needed to perform a computing task will fall by half every one and a half years.
The description of improving energy efficiency was the conclusion of an analysis published last year in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, with the title “Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing.” (An early draft [PDF] of the paper is here.) Jonathan G. Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford University, was the lead author. His collaborators were three other scientists — Stephen Berard of Microsoft, Maria Sanchez of Carnegie Mellon University, and Henry Wong of Intel. (Mr. Koomey did not use the term “Koomey’s Law,” but others have.)
Like Moore’s Law, the significance of Koomey’s Law is more as an influential observation than a scientific discovery. Both are concepts that credibly measure what has happened and what is possible with investment and effort.
