Koomey's Law for Energy Efficiency

An interesting alternative or complement to Moore's Law … Computing power: A deeper law than Moore's?:

a new analysis, by Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University and his colleagues, [sic] seems to have uncovered a deeper law relating to the energy-efficiency of computers, dating back to the era of vacuum tubes. The researchers found that the electrical efficiency of computing has doubled every 1.6 years since the mid-1940s. “That means that for a fixed amount of computational power, the need for battery capacity will fall by half every 1.6 years,” observes Dr Koomey.

Moore's Law: 60 Terabyte Drives in 10 Years

Won't we all be using SSD drives in 10 years?

Seagate Stuffs 1 Trillion Bits Into Square-Inch Hard Disk:

Seagate has demonstrated hard drive technology that squeezes a trillion bits into a single square inch, claiming it’s the first hard drive manufacturer to do so.

Over the next 10 years, the company says, this will lead to standard 3.5-inch drives that can store 60 terabytes of information. Today’s 3.5-inch drives give you three terabytes of storage, stuffing about 620 billion bits into each square inch.

When Will Batteries Get Better?

Moore's law has provided us with dramatic improvements in CPUs, memory, hard disks, etc, but has had little impact on batteries. While the iPad has great battery life, this is due mostly to being almost all battery internally.

Louis Bergeron reporting … Stanford develops new batteries:

Stanford researchers have used nanoparticles of a copper compound to develop a high-power battery electrode that is so inexpensive to make, so efficient and so durable that it could be used to build batteries big enough for economical large-scale energy storage on the electrical grid – something researchers have sought for years.

Moore's Law

4,400 versus 0.001 pounds

20 GB in 1980 vs 32 GB in 2011:

Moore's Law Smashed?

Intel details their upcoming processors.

Intel reveals skinny Ivy Bridge 'Ultrabooks,' Moore's Law-defying Atoms

reduced power consumption and sleek designs in 2012.
...

[a] new class of PC, dubbed "Ultrabooks," will make up 40-percent of the market by the end of 2012. These machines, powered by the 22nm Ivy Bridge, will be less than 0.8-inches thick and start at under $1,000
...

going forward, the Atom line [will] be getting a die shrink every year, as opposed to every two. The upcoming, 32nm Cedar Trail will usher in the new Moore's Law-smashing era with promises of a 10 hour battery life and weeks of standby, and will be succeeded by 22nm and 14nm models.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Apple, Batteries, and Moore's Law

Batteries seem to be the one area of technology that has been immune to Moore's Law. The only company that has really seemed to be innovating in this area is Apple - with long life batteries in iPads, and MacBooks. Some would even say the iPhone 4 has a fairly substantial battery life - at least compared to other similar smartphones.

Here's another peak at Apple trying to improve battery life without increasing the size of the battery - remember, the iPad - internally - is mosty battery.
Apple looking to increase battery life with dense lithium cells:

Apple is investigating techniques to increase the energy capacity of rechargeable lithium battery cells without increasing the size of the battery, allowing longer battery life in future devices.

The proposed invention is detailed in a new patent application published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week and discovered by AppleInsider. The filing, titled "Increasing Energy Density in Rechargeable Lithium Battery Cells," describes charging a battery using a "multi-step constant-current constant-voltage (CC-CV) charging technique."

The CC-CV charging technique would allow the thickness of the anode active material inside a battery cell to be increased in both "volumetric and gravimetric energy density." But while the density of the power capacity would be increased, the size of the battery, as well as its maximum charging time and minimum life cycle, would remain unchanged.

A Couple of Great Data Points for Moore's Law

Computer History Museum to highlight storage, from RAMAC to microdrives:

In the 1950s, storage hardware was measured in feet -- and in tons. Back then, the era's state-of-the-art computer drive was found in IBM's RAMAC 305; it consisted of two refrigerator-size boxes that weighed about a ton each. One box held 40 24-inch dual-sided magnetic disk platters; a carriage with two recording heads suspended by compressed air moved up and down the stack to access the disks. The other cabinet contained the data processing unit, the magnetic process drum, magnetic core register and electronic logical and arithmetic circuits. 

Today, we have flash drives, microdrives, and onboard solid-state drives that weigh almost nothing, hold gigabytes of data and cost -- compared to the 1950s -- very little. How cheap is storage now? A 1TB hard drive that sells for as little as $60 today would have been worth $1 trillion in the 1950s, when computer storage cost $1 per byte

see the entire slideshow here


Lithium-Ion Battery Prices: Moore's Law After All?:

From Paul Sankey's much-cited update report on his "end of the oil age" thesis, the following graph is his take on a speedy decline in lithium-ion battery prices in the coming decade. Sankey argues that this will make all-electric cars are competitive sans subsidy by ... 2020.

Moore’s Law Hits a Brick Wall

The end of Moore's Law - doubling the capacity of semiconductors every 18 months - from no less an authority than SanDisk CEO and founder Eli Harari. He's not real optimistic that we can do anything to avoid hitting the wall in five years. Funny, the WolframAlpha result for Moore's law is 2011 - I guess they're computing an even shorter lifespan.

Counting Down to the End of Moore’s Law - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

[we] can double the capacity of its chips only two more times. Once the industry goes from its current 64-billion-bit chip to a 256-billion-bit chip (that’s 32 gigabytes), it will hit that brick wall.

Then what?

Your camera and music player will certainly be able to store a lot of files. But you won’t be able to count on next year’s iPhone having double the capacity at the same price.

The Memristor - Supercharging Moore's Law

Interesting story from MIT's Technology Review. Here's a link to a video explaining memristors.
Technology Review: Memristors Make Chips Cheaper

Researchers at HP Labs in Palo Alto, CA, are betting that a new fundamental electronic component--the memristor--will keep computer power increasing at this rate for years to come.

Memristors were first predicted in 1971 by Berkeley professor Leon Chua. They are nanoscale devices with unique properties: a variable resistance and the ability to remember the resistance even when the power is off.

After rediscovering Chua's work, researchers at HP Labs built the first working memristor in May of this year. And last week, at the first ever Memristor and Memristor Systems Symposium, in Berkeley, CA, the same team showed how memristors can be integrated into functioning circuits. Their circuits require fewer transistors, allowing more components (and more computing power) to be packed into the same physical space while also using less power to function.

"We're trying to give Moore's Law a boost," says lead researcher Stan Williams, a senior research fellow at HP, referring to a prediction made by Intel founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a computer circuit (and therefore computer performance) should double roughly every two years.