Quote:
Originally Posted by
drbaltazar 
battery have evolved a lot but so did our energy requirement !(luxury)they couldnt dream of an electric car or a hybrid in the past ,now they can!
This is the problem...
We make our chips smaller, so that we can do the same work for less power better TFLOP/Watt, but we always want more power, so we end up using the same or more Watts...less than 10 years ago a high end PC would require a 300W PSU (with worse efficiencies etc mind you)...now we have "need" for 500W+ PSUs...slightly better PSU efficiency cannot make up the difference...
We make engines that can do more than 10 miles / gallon on those tracks? - Great, lets make bigger engines so that we don't ruin the trend.
We make even more efficient engines that lower consumption while bringing vastly more power on demand? Great, we always needed that 0-60/0-100 5.5 sec 2 metric ton SUV...
We get more efficient in what we do and how we use power, yet instead of lowering our footprint, we just consume more till we match or we surpass our current one...otherwise it is not thought as progress.
Doing what a PIII did 10 years ago with 1/10th the power, is lame. We get cell phones that do more than that. But it is still lame...we need the desktop, the laptop, the cell, the tablet that all can do that...
Now we will get better batteries...once more, as batteries is probably one of the fastest growing / evolving sectors in the technologies involved with portable devices.
Will we say
"great, my iPhone now can last for 3-4 days for the same consumption", or will we go
"great - I can push 3 times the performance now without losing running time"....
most likely the 2nd will have a better impact on sales, so we will go the 2nd option (still remember my 1st Li-Pol cell phone, a nokia 6310i that could last 9-10 days on a single charge).
Today in the US, the average person consumes 50x more than the average person in the developing countries, using imported resources under shady conditions, and relying on abused workforce to outsource production. Yet lowering our "standards" is preposterous. Is against progress.
