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Whither Moore's Law; Introducing Koomey's Law
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."
My favorite example of computing (in)efficiency is the USAF's SAGE bomber tracking computers introduced in the 1950s. These vacuum tube machines had CPU horsepower probably in the same ballpark as an 80286, but could draw more than 2 megawatts of power each. They didn't decommission the last one until the 1980s.
Is there a limit to how efficient calculation can get? Is there some minimum amount of energy required to do one computation? How do you measure "computations" anway, and what units would you use? Bits? Inverse bits?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
While private sector is working on doubling energy efficiency every number of years, or maybe doubling packaging density of transistors, etc. The government is working on doubling the debt, trade deficit and unemployment, while putting the inflation on a different kind of a curve, which may end up looking like exponential at some point in time, also increasing bureaucracy in ways that could be considered hyperbolic or maybe just functions of power.
The differences are stark.
I read the first paragraph of TFA, and what do I see? An incorrect statement of Moore's Law. The correct Moore's Law is transistor count doubles every 18 months, not this vague and misleading idea of computing "power". I understand where the "computing power" version came from and it's usefulness for people without a technical background, but this article is for technically minded people and should have the correct definition.
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Invited everyone you ever knew
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Does this take into account the miniaturization of electronics and the associated increase in battery size? We're seeing this in many mobile platforms. I'm curious if this is taken into account when they consider 'battery life' while possibly ignoring that batteries themselves may be more efficient or simply larger due to more space in the enclosure.
Have this site strayed so far from "news for NERDS" that it has to explain what an Altair 8800 is? Haven't many/most of us used or owned them? It was only one of the most popular systems of the day.
What's next, explaining Commodore 64's? Apple II's?
The Cray-1 was ECL. The Altair 8800 was TTL. We're now CMOS, but I wouldn't mind an ECL i7, despite the fluorinert waterfall... (My real point is that there were very serious differences between the Altair 8800 and the Cray-1 despite the obvious which lend to significant differences in power dissipation...and speed.)
Additionally, the other thing this article doesn't take into account is the preponderance of battery-powered modern devices -- before, power consumption wasn't really much of any consideration (plus, now it's marketing!)
I do not think that you get net energy savings (by using the same basic technology, e.g., CMOS at room temeprature or "cold"), if you take into account the fact that cooling things down also costs energy! For example, liquid helium refrigeration costs about 1 kW of wall outlet power to compensate for 1 W dissipated at 4.2 K.
Changing your basic technology to, e.g., some version of superconductor-based logic can help (a lot!), current state of the art (in my very biased opinion, since I am cheering for those guys, and have been involved in related research for years) is here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/superconductor-logic-goes-lowpower ...
Paul B.
Where is the human brain on that chart?
dictionary.com says:
adverb:
1. to what place? where?
2. to what end, point, action, or the like? to what?
conjunction:
3. to which place.
4.to whatever place.
To what place Moore's law? Where Moore's law? To which place Moore's law? To whatever place Moore's law?
No, none of those make sense. WTF? Is this Use an unusual word day?
Whither thou goest, so goest I.
Ray Kurzweil already showed us this, in 2005. 'The Singularity is Near', pg 129.
His reference was Gene Frantz's article, “Digital Signal Processing Trends,” from IEEE Micro 20.6 (November/December 2000)
Nonsense. What kind of fixed load did they define? How does this fixed load utilize available system resources? I could define a code payload targeted at technologies present in early 90s Pentium CPUs, and then run this code on a modern machine for a much greater overall gap in efficiency. Producing any target number I want, thus correlating or wildly disproving this law. This hardly qualifies as a constant, let alone a "law." There are just to many factors involved to make any kind of statement like this. Moore's law isn't wrong...it just didn't take into account all the variables. Neither does Koomey's.
I hope submitter realizes that is a logarithmic scale and that by my best guesstimate graph reading the Cray was about 5 times more efficient than the Altair,
They may indeed "sit next to each other" but that doesn't in this case imply comparable efficiency.
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.
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The Altair 880 is nowhere near the Cray 1. True, they're separated by something less than an order of magnitude (perhaps a factor of 5 or so) but the Altair isn't exactly near the Cray. It'd be fair to say, however, that the Altair is about the same as the PDP-11/20. Learn to read the graph.
This is totally not surprising to me. both the sage and the colossus were designed to do something really specific. The 286 is designed to be much more general purpose. Therefore it is of no surprise that SAGE and the Colossus can do their jobs faster, but give them any other task and the 286 would win hands down.
Isn't this a trivial consequence of Moore's law, if we interpret the latter to mean exponential growth of (computations/time), and additionally make the very reasonable assumption that users' tolerance for power consumption (energy/time) is more or less constant?
What about the energy used creating efficiency?
Are we experiencing an increase in efficiency?
OR
Are we expending every increasing amounts of energy creating the appearance of efficiency?
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
What about Intel Atom, Nvidia Tesla, Transmeta , ARM, MIPS, TI MSP430, PicoChip, XMOS, Ubicom32, Hyperstone, ...?
The recent ones listed there are pretty boring.
I've not read the article (in true Slashdot fashion), but I'm taking issue with the statement "An early hobbyist computer, the Altair 8800 sits right near the Cray-1 supercomputer of the same era" from the stub. Really? Is that meant to be insightful? They're from the same era, so the same research has been done to get both to the same point. The Cray has many more CPUs of the same generation as the Altair, so uses a lot more power. Am I supposed to be surprised by this?
Either way, I don't really see an application for this "law" other than as benchmarking progress. Neat trend to notice, but not exactly useful.
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Are they saying because Moore's law is a slightly bit off and that someone has proved that it is a .5 year off, that we rename the law to this new scientists name?
If I proved something different with the theory of relativity, does that mean that Einstein is any less the creator of that theory?
I would hope not....
55,000 tubes vs. 134,000 transistors
Had 256 KB + 16 KB RAM vs. the 512-640 KB common in the 286
75,000 instructions per second vs. 1.2 million (@6 MHz)
SAGE used 52 of them, half online at a time, geographically dispersed, all working on tracking aircraft. But they did communicate with each other, so you might consider this a 1,950,000 instructions per second cluster, beating the first 286s that came out around the time SAGE was stood down.
With computers it is pretty much like with cars. Better enegry-efficiency is possible, but the consumers want more performance rather than higher efficiency. So they are fed with what they want, regardless of the climate-catastrophy taking place on our planet already.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.