Will they call it Koomey's corollary?
The original Moore's Law held that innovation and improvements in the development of computer processors would result in a doubling of processing power every 18 months. And that prediction from Intel founder Gordon Moore has proved to be mostly correct.
Now along comes Jonathan Koomey to add a corollary. "The idea is that at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half." Link.
As processing power doubles every 18 months, the energy usage is halved during that same time span. He says the same things that improve processing power also help to reduce energy consumption. The smaller size of the processors means less time wasted communicating between the processor components, thus more efficiency. He's primarily interested in data processing facilities, but the same principle should apply to consumer applications.
As consumers, we've benefited from all that increased power -- anyone who bought one of those desktop computers in the 80s got a unit that cost a lot of money, took up a lot of space, and didn't do a whole heck of a lot. (I had pages and pages of documents stored on stacks of 5.25" floppy disks. It seemed quite efficient at the time, but even starving third world peasants would shun such an antiquated system now.)
So as the processors get more efficient and energy usage is lessened, we should expect to get a lot more mileage out of a fully charged battery. That laptop should be functioning for days instead of hours.
That insight would have saved us a lot of erffot early on.
Posted by: Keydren | June 23, 2012 at 11:54 AM