Whither Moore's Law; Introducing Koomey's Law 105
Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, Beorytis writes "MIT Technology review reports on a recent paper by Stanford professor Dr. Jon Koomey, which claims to show that the energy efficiency of computing doubles every 1.5 years. Note that efficiency is considered in terms of a fixed computing load, a point soon to be lost on the mainstream press. Also interesting is a graph in a related blog post that really highlights the meaning of the 'fixed computing load' assumption by plotting computations per kWh vs. time. An early hobbyist computer, the Altair 8800 sits right near the Cray-1 supercomputer of the same era."
This is such an absurd point (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the inverse of Moore's law so yeah, duh....
If your compute power doubles in the same size die every 1.5 years, then if you halve the die size keeping the compute power the same you actually cut the power in half. This is a very well known phenomenon and Koomey is doing what he has been for a while, making headlines with little substance and lots of flair.
That Microsoft and Intel paid for this research calls into question what it was they were actually paying for.