Beyond Moore’s Law

“The number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months.” – Gordon Moore, 1965. Moore co-founded Intel Corp. in July 1968 and served as its President and Chief Executive Officer from 1975 until his retirement in 1997. He was named Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corp. in 1997.

Moore’s Law has become shorthand for rapid technological change. Today, we find the industry approaching the end of Moore’s Law, where the networking and communications equipment is becoming less efficient as network capacity scaling appears to be peaking; the energy implications are impossible to meet with current solutions. The end of scaling and the continued explosive growth in demand is creating an energy crisis in networks.

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry currently accounts for 2 percent of worldwide carbon emissions – and that figure is expected to at least double over the next decade as more people seek to connect with each other and with more content in new, richer ways. However, today’s networks are optimized for performance, not energy efficiency. 

To meet these new energy challenges, Bell Labs started GreenTouch a consortium of leading ICT industry, academic and non-governmental research experts dedicated to fundamentally transforming communications and data networks, including the Internet, and significantly reducing the carbon footprint of ICT devices, platforms and networks.

By 2015, the goal of GreenTouch is to deliver the architecture, specifications and roadmap – and demonstrate key components – needed to increase network energy efficiency by a factor of 1,000 from current levels.

GreenTouch members and the global community will benefit from:

• A reinvention of today’s telecommunications networks
• A sustainable future for data networking and the Internet
• Unprecedented collaboration with leading experts from around the world
•  Participation in fundamental research in exciting new areas
• Access to network models and studies examining key energy related issues
•  Information on network power consumption, traffic growth, and energy trends