Chip Technology: Koomey joins Moore

Chip Technology: Koomey joins Moore

The famous Moore's Law states that the power of microprocessors doubles every 18 months. U.S. researchers have calculated that this law is observed in six decades for the energy efficiency of computers: it also doubles every 18 months, reports Technology Review in its online edition. 

"At a defined workload halved all the necessary battery capacity and a half years," says Jonathan Koomey at Stanford University, the lead author of the study, the conclusion from the new observation. For the study, he worked with engineers from Intel, Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University together. 

To arrive at its result, attracted the researchers historical data on the peak power consumption of electronic calculators since the ENIAC approach of 1956, the first general-purpose computer, which was built for the U.S. military to calculate the trajectories of projectiles. He was still working with vacuum tubes instead of transistors, an area of ​​167 square feet finished and had an output of 150 kilowatts. His performance was in some 100 operations per second. 

The newfound legality applies to a doubling of energy efficiency every 18 months too old for this generation of computers before the introduction of the transistor, says Koomey. "It is a fundamental property of information technologies that use electrons to switch," said Stanford engineer. "The rate is a function not only of components on a chip." In the efficiency were also engineering considerations, including the speed at which the components communicate with each other or their size.