Figure 1

The Computing system evolution trends starting from the year 1946 to the present day based on four different figure-of-merit: (a) Moore’s law which counts the number of the components on-chip in unit of transistor numbers; (b) Koomey’s law which represents the energy efficiency per computing in unit of bit/Joule; (c) Makimoto’s figure-of-merit that includes the 'intelligence', power, size and the cost of the system in unit of MIPS/(W·mm³·$); and (d) CLEAR (defined in Eq. (4)) that also considers the latency of a system in addition to Makimoto’s figure-of-merit as well as the economic resistance to a new-technology adoption units: MIPS/(sec·W·mm³·$). Moreover, the Photonic CLEAR data are plotted based on Intel’s forecast for silicon photonics. Dashed lines represent the linear fit (in log-scale) based on the initial growth rate, with an annual performance doubling rate. Transparency has been adjusted in each figure for better visibility.