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Reimagining Moore's Law As An Energy Consumption Black Hole

My computer, a decent-enough 2011 Lenovo laptop, sucks up about 20 watts of electricty during average use, about half the amount of electricty as my weak bedside lamp. ENIAC, born in 1946 and considered the first-ever general purpose computer, used...

My computer, a decent-enough 2011 Lenovo laptop, sucks up about 20 watts of electricty during average use, about half the amount of electricty as my weak bedside lamp. ENIAC (above), born in 1946 and considered the first-ever general purpose computer, used about 150,000 watts of power to do comparatively easy calculations. That’s about seven or eight electric car engines worth of wattage, or 3,750 weak bedside lamps.

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Interestingly enough, you’d find that this leap corresponds well with Moore’s law, which states that computing power should be able to double itself every 18 months. Moore’s law doesn’t directly make predictions about energy consumption, only processing power — the number of transistors you can fit onto a chip. But a Stanford researcher, Jonathan Koomey, has identified a powerful correlation: as Moore’s law predicts that computing power doubles every 18 months, Koomey’s research has shown that energy consumption has halved every 18 months. So, yeah, meet Koomey’s law.

“This is a fundamental characteristic of information technology that uses electrons for switching,” Koomey tells MIT’s Technology Review. “It’s not just a function of the components on a chip.” Arguably, it’s a characteristic that could eclipse Moore’s law in importance as things like battery life and efficiency become as important or even more important than raw computing power. Not that efficiency and power are in any way seperable: it’s the things that make computers faster that make them more efficient, things like component size and the amount of energy that can be stored in a capcitor.

Side note: primarily through efficiency, across the board, electricity consumption in the U.S. has stagnated. We use more electrical devices than anyone could have imagined in their wildest dreams in 1946, but we’ve leveled off on consumption. Utilities now don’t know whether or not to build new power plants. Enjoy it while it lasts: electric cars don’t follow “Koomey’s law.” Meanwhile, according to an old prediction from Richard Feynman, computing efficiency can improve by a factor of 1 billion before it hits a limit.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.