Hang around with technologists for long-enough, and you’re sure to hear mention of Moore’s Law, a once-precise empirical observation about how semiconductor components were shrinking. But there’s a little-known but very important parallel movement to Moore’s Law recently elucidated by Jonathan Koomey, an energy specialist at Stanford and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Koomey went back into the historical record and found that the electrical efficiency of computing has been increasing at the roughly the same pace as computing speed.
The Green Corollary to Moore’s Law
July 13, 2010