Video of my talk at Microsoft, Dec 2, 2010: "Why we can expect ever more amazing mobile computing devices in the years ahead"

I was invited by Christian Belady at Microsoft to give a talk about my computing trends work at Microsoft, and the video of that Dec. 2, 2010 talk can be found here.    The talk turned out pretty well.  The implications of this work related to the capabilities and prevalence of mobile computing devices–the electrical efficiency of electronic computing has doubled every 1.6 years since the mid 1940s.  That means that for a fixed amount of computational power, the need for battery capacity will fall by half every 1.6 years, and that trend bodes well for the continued explosive growth in mobile computing, sensors and controls.

Alexis Madrigal wrote a nice summary of these trends for the Atlantic, readable here. He dubbed this “Koomey’s corollary to Moore’s law”, which makes me blush, but he’s a brilliant writer who excels in summarizing complex issues for a general audience, so his summary is worth a read.

Reference:  Koomey, Jonathan G., Stephen Berard, Marla Sanchez, and Henry Wong. 2010. “Implications of Historical Trends in The Electrical Efficiency of Computing."  In Press at the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.  March.   Email me if you want a copy.

Figure 1:  Computations per kWh over time

Graph of computations/kWh from 1946 to 2009 by Jonathan Koomey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.koomey.com.