Koomey's law

Professor Jonathan Koomey described the trend in a 2010 paper in which he wrote that "at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half.

[4] The implications of Koomey's law are that the amount of battery needed for a fixed computing load will fall by a factor of 100 every decade.

[6] Koomey writes that "as with any exponential trend, this one will eventually end...in a decade or so, energy use will once again be dominated by the power consumed when a computer is active.

[7] It was further discussed in MIT Technology Review,[8] and in a post by Erik Brynjolfsson on the "Economics of Information" blog,[5] and at The Economist online.

For example, in 2020 AMD reported that, since 2014, the company has managed to improve the efficiency of its mobile processors by a factor of 31.7, which is a doubling rate of 1.2 years.

"[12] By the second law of thermodynamics and Landauer's principle, irreversible computing cannot continue to be made more energy efficient forever.