New 'Koomey`s Law' of power efficiency parallels Moore'e Law

Thursday, September 15, 2011 - 07:31 in Mathematics & Economics

(PhysOrg.com) -- For most of the computer age, the central theme in computer hardware architecture has been: create more computational power using the same amount of chip space. Intel founder Gordon Moore even came up with a “law” based on what he’d seen up to that point to predict how things would go in the future; that computing power would double every year and a half. Now Jonathan Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford has led a study that shows that the electrical energy efficiency of computers has been following roughly the same path. He and his colleagues from Microsoft and Intel have published the results of their study in EEE Annals of the History of Computing that shows that the energy efficiency of computers has doubled nearly every eighteen months (now called appropriately enough, Koomey’s Law) going all the way back to the very first computers built in...

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