Trends in Computing

Visualizing empirical "laws" of the industry

Transitors

Moore's "Law" states that the number of transistors in CPUs will double every two years (sometimes incorrectly quoted as the speed doubling every two years).

transistor-count.svg
Figure 1: Source: Transistor Count; Download as CSV

Bandwidth

Nielsen's "Law of Internet Bandwidth" states that users' bandwidth grows by 50% per year. This is harder to validate with open data. As a proxy, here's the download rate of popular communication technologies by release date:

bandwidth.svg
Figure 2: Sources: N-ISDN, 3G, 4G, V.90, V.34, ADSL; Download as CSV

Efficiency

Koomey's law states the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated doubles about every 2.6 years. Here's the numerical computing performance vs. power rating of the top 500 most energy efficient supercomputers over the last decade:

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Figure 3: Source: Green500 Lists; Download as CSV

© 2020 Henrique C A