XO, energy, the environment and the myth of Moore's Law

Walter Bender , president of the OLPC foundation, writes on the OLPC news list:

“By concentrating on low-cost, low-power, long-life, and field repair, we have achieved what many assume costs extra (and many corporations would ordinarily charge more for): XO is the most environmentally friendly laptop ever made. At one point we had heard from very knowledgeable manufacturers that it would cost us at least US $20 extra just to meet the EU environmental requirements. This was not true. In fact, if every laptop and desktop user in the world switched to an XO right now, about 85 terawatt-hours of energy could be saved. The energy-bill savings alone could fund the outright purchase of 50-million XO laptops. In addition, 50M barrels of oil could saved, which is an additional US $500M in carbon-offset dollars, yearly.”

The XO laptop draws 3 watt-hours, which is 26 kilowatt-hours a year. My laptop uses about 30 times more than the XO. José Antonio Meira da Rocha has put together a comparative spreadsheet of the energy savings of different laptops, including the XO and the ClassMate. The figures are in Brazilian reais, each worth about 0.5 dollars at present.

The industry has a lot to learn from this project. It is possible to build laptops that use less energy. It is possible to build laptops that cost less than they do today. Something is wrong. Bad design? Bad practices? Or is it simply mental laziness, this perpetuating of inefficient, badly designed architectures.

The myth of Moore’s Law

Alan Kay tells the story of a highly optimized system written at Xerox PARC in 1979 that runs barely 50 times faster on one of today’s machines. The projection according to Moore’s Law says that system should have seen an improvement of 40,000 or 60,000 times.

What’s the problem?

Alan Kay’s answer is very simple: the architecture. There is a factor of 1,000 that has been lost to bad architecture design.

“The myth that it doesn’t matter what your processor architecture is, that is, that Moore’s Law will take care of everything, is totally false.”

Hardware architectures have not improved, that much is clear. The XO is an example that when smart people who care about the problems that actually need solving, and not about making money, get to work, they can build innovative, efficient architectures.

OLPC’s XO project is already a great success. We can complain that we have been fooled all this time: 100-dollar laptops aren’t available because of ineptitude (or maybe out of plain greed).