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Why We Need a Second Moore's Law
Roland Piquepaille writes "In its April issue, Wired Magazine argues that we need a second Moore's law, this time about overall efficiencies of our computers and other electronic devices. The subtitle of the article summarizes it: "If we don't do something about increasing battery life, we're toast." Michael S. Malone, the author, says that the first Moore's law is endangered, not because the semiconductor industry cannot build new generation of chips, but because we will not be able to provide them with enough power. And he contends that the problem arises from the fact that we are using more and more wireless devices, which obviously are not connected to a plug. This overview contains selected excerpts of this eye-opening article."
The more I hear about power and energy issues and American obesity issues, the more I think we'd be served well by installing some kind of human power generator factory similar to a gym, where maybe people going on lots of exercise bikes could charge up portable batteries or something.
I mean Hell, $50 for a new cellphone battery when yours craps out, or two hours on the bike with a better rechargable...
People with too much energy and electronic devices that need energy. There has to be a way to make it work together.
Ok... I just reread that, and I've officially been awake way too long.
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What we need is a fourth axis of development - a systematic improvement of overall system efficiency, from the individual silicon gate, through motherboards and displays, all the way up to the Internet itself. How do we do it? Exhaustively.
Exactly. When processor speeds and memory was low the industry did their best to fit what they could in the limited space. Now that we have more room we are being lazy and only concentrating on making things "larger than life" instead of faster and smaller.
We should really start to concentrate on making the software run best under what we currently have. I know that Intel and Kingston wouldn't exactly be happy but our pockets and our grid would.
Moore's law is an observation, not something that the industry is forced to follow. You can't just say "we need more efficiency - let's define a new Moore's law".
Phil
Marshmallows taste better than silicon chips when squished between chocolate bars and graham crackers. The improvement in taste of marshmallow s'mores is immediately and at least 1.5x noticeably better with every silicon-based s'more eaten.
really, springs, clocksprings to be exact. I brought this up in another discussion last week. I have two radios (baygen/freeplay)that make quite good use of windup to tighten a spring to run a microgenerator technology in lieu of batteries. I have another radio that has built in solar and a crank on the side that is a direct generator to on board rechargeable battery, plus it has another compartment that holds disposable batteries, or you can plug in a voltage adapter. It's an inexpensive radio, but it has 4 way power and works quite well. I understand now that grundig has an even higher quality radio with a similar crank to microgenerator scheme. This sort of technology makes use of extremely efficient energy conversion and energy storage, ie, biochemical from the human body, that beats heck out of any battery out there. How about at least starting with a PDA to see if the windup style concepts have merit and can be adapted up the useage scale then? I see a lot of these PDAs use AA or AAA batteries, the same as these small radios, seems a natural to me. Even just a power adapter that is the spring, crank and battery bank, and that plugs into existing PDAs if they have a DC jack in. something along those lines. It's just not that hard to run a tiny crank for 30 to 60 seconds.
n its April issue, Wired Magazine argues that we need a second Moore's law, this time about overall efficiencies of our computers and other electronic devices. The subtitle of the article summarizes it: "If we don't do something about increasing battery life, we're toast."
I can imagine the board room at Intel where the chairman is yelling, "The 3rd quarter numbers suggest we aren't going to make Moore's law this year! I want people to double their efforts -- cancel lunch until further notice!"
I can guarantee that if wired magazine invents a new moore's law, it is going to have zero effect on technology. Anyways, Moore's law is based on an observation, maybe we should look at the growth of power requirements and fit it to that.
I suggest we call the wired law: Moron's Law
OK, when on the move, how many people who are doing word processing need more than the features of WordPerfect 5, the early versions of Excel for Windows and that kind of thing?
What we need is a really low electrical power CPU - optimized to take as little electricity as possible, but which is capable of running these kinds of applications acceptably quickly. It probably doesn't need to be more than 50MHz. Put this in a ultra-lightweight laptop style case, using solid state storage for disk (you can get USB memory sticks with 512MB which is more than sufficient for this class of computing) and have the battery go a day or two between charges.
My mobile phone is a case in point. Although it's not a word processor, I've got an organizer, email client, lightweight web browser, camera, SSH client, IRC client and pager all rolled into one, and it'll go ten days without a charge on standby, and can be used for 7 hours on one charge with a tiny battery. I can even make phone calls on it. Make essentially a notebook with mobile phone technology, and you've got an excellent portable internet terminal that you can write documents, make spreadsheets, compile small programs etc. on.
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I second that. It makes me sad when people say that it doesn't matter the software is inefficient, because computers will get faster, which will solve the problem. What this means is that, because the developers were sloppy, the users have to pay more (they need faster and typically more power-hungry machines).
Making more efficient software benefits users _now_, instead of in 5 years when computers have gotten faster and new power sources have been invented, and new software will have been invented that needs even faster computers. Having a lot of CPU power is no excuse for wasting it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.