Computations per joule of energy has roughly doubled every 1.5 to 2.6 years.
Koomey's law matters more than Moore's for battery-powered devices. It is why phones do more each year without larger batteries, and it has continued after transistor scaling slowed.
In practice
- A phone released a decade after another does far more on a battery of the same size, and no processor got faster per clock.
- A remote sensor that needed mains power in 2010 runs three years on a coin cell in 2022, which is what made the deployment possible.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Technology & Software
- Essay
- The curves, the limits and the laws of software