Chart of the Day: The Computing Trend that Will Change Everything

The progress of computational power is the essence of the the information age which will serve as the backbone for the most of technological innovation (whether in big data, smart manufacturing and wireless revolution).

From technologyreview.com

The performance of computers has shown remarkable and steady growth, doubling every year and a half since the 1970s. What most folks don't know, however, is that the electrical efficiency of computing (the number of computations that can be completed per kilowatt-hour of electricity used) has also doubled every year and a half since the dawn of the computer age.

Laptops and mobile phones owe their existence to this trend, which has led to rapid reductions in the power consumed by battery-powered computing devices. The most important future effect is that the power needed to perform a task requiring a fixed number of computations will continue to fall by half every 1.5 years (or a factor of 100 every decade). As a result, even smaller and less power-intensive computing devices will proliferate, paving the way for new mobile computing and communications applications that vastly increase our ability to collect and use data in real time…

How long can this trend continue? In 1985, the physicist Richard Feynman calculated that the energy efficiency of computers could improve over then-current levels by a factor of at least a hundred billion (10¹¹), and our data indicate that the efficiency of computing devices progressed by only about a factor of 40,000 from 1985 to 2009. In other words, we've hardly begun to tap the full potential…

The real life impact of the Moore’s law applied to electrical efficiency of computing, from the same article…

The long-term increase in the energy efficiency of computing (and the technologies it makes possible) will revolutionize how we collect and analyze data and how we use data to make better decisions. It will help the "Internet of things" become a reality—a development with profound implications for how businesses, and society generally, will develop in the decades ahead. It will enable us to control industrial processes with more precision, to assess the results of our actions quickly and effectively, and to rapidly reinvent our institutions and business models to reflect new realities. It will also help us move toward a more experimental approach to interacting with the world: we will be able to test our assumptions with real data in real time, and modify those assumptions as reality dictates.