So, there’s a new law in town? Moore’s law is a thing of the past and it’s now Koomey’s law that is making inroads into theoretical thinking. Not really. In reality, it appears that Moore’s law and Koomey’s law may be parts of the same stream of thought, with Koomey being a side effect of the increase in processing power.
Per Wikipedia:
Because of Koomey’s Law, the amount of battery needed for a fixed computing load will fall by factor of 10 roughly every five years. As computing devices become smaller and more mobile, this trend may be even more important that improvements in raw processing power for many applications. Furthermore, energy cost are becoming an increasingly important determinant of the economics of data centers, further increasing the importance of Koomey’s Law.
If you want to go into extreme detail, a professor at Stanford University, Jonathan Koomey has written a new paper on “Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing”, that explains the relation between tenants of Moore’s law (computer processing power doubles roughly every 18 months) and the new Koomey perspective (power efficiency has been doubling every 18 months, along with improved performance).
This is particularly interesting to us at 1E as we strive to maintain our position as the IT Efficiency leader. There is efficiency to be gleaned everywhere. Over time, as technology has improved and power has increased, companies have simply gotten accustomed to the power and forgotten that there are always implications to the reluctance maintaining efficient levels of operations. The result is waste in the IT organization. Too many servers and licenses of software that are not needed are good examples of areas in IT that have gone unmanaged. With efficiency of computing devices improving, companies should be looking internally to match efficiency with the business. An efficient IT makes an efficient (and sustainable) business.
