Koomey's Law vs. Moore's Law

For some time I've been fascinated by laws that scientists, economists, and other social scientists come up with that accurately describe relationships that occur in the world around us. Moore's law is one of those laws that has had exciting implications in the field of technology. Most people have heard of Moore's Law, but in case you haven't, here's what Investopedia has to say about it:

An observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965. He noticed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. Moore’s law predicts that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future.

Although the pace has slowed, the number of transistors per square inch has since doubled approximately every 18 months. This is used as the current definition of Moore's law.

While Moore's law has been amazingly accurate in describing the doubling of computing power over time (and has even become part of the planning process for technology companies), it may start fading away as physical limitations start to come into play. Opinions are mixed.

A new finding by Stanford professor Jonathan Koomey could become the new Moore's Law. The gist of the Koomey's law is that the energy efficiency of computers doubles every 1.5 years. This is an important finding! The chart below illustrates how historically strong the relationship is.

Source: The Economist Daily Chart

Ceteris paribus, Koomey's law means that  that our laptops and devices will keep getting lighter and lighter as battery sizes will shrink... but will all else be equal? Probably not. Programs and data types are constantly requiring greater amounts of computing power, and thus more energy. Thus, batteries will likely shrink, but at a much slower rate than predicted by Koomey's law because of the demand for increases in computing power. Still exciting stuff though!

*Note, I'm aware that Koomey's finding is not officially a law yet. But, it's much easier to call it Koomey's law than Koomey's finding. When does a finding actually become a "law" anyway?

**Eric Brynjolfsson, an MIT professor who blogs over at Economics of Information has a similar post on the topic.