I wholly agree. Moore's law has become a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. I wonder if chipmakers are making their processors more and more powerhungry because peopleexpect the processors to double in processing capacity every 18 months.Of course this is a little simplistic: the AMD-Intel competition drives this as well. It's interesting that Intel denies the fact (on their website).Just look at how much more power hungry power supplies have become. Part of the fault comes from the Graphics card of course.

What does seem true is that with yesterday's power supplieswe could be making much faster machines than yesterday and in fact it seems that machines that run just a little less fast could be consuming a lot less.

One good thing is that with LCD screens that peripheral has suddenly required less energy.

The problem with your assessment, is that the chip companies ARE working on making processors smaller, cheaper, and more efficient. This is an over simplification, but think of it like this, that in doing so, they just so happen to get faster.

Now, going on about storage, displays, and communications, that is a different subject all together.

Answer? Because computer manufacturing is a business, and is funded by business interests. They want your money. And they want it often.

One could argue that it is also a key strategic resource and we would all benefit from a publicly-funded and supported research group, but that would take all kinds of public sector invasion into what is currently a private industry.

Okay this is off-topic but I couldn't resist the reference to the argument of "key strategic resource".

Something I've been pondering lately: do people feel that, as technology advances, we somehow acquire new fundamental (individual) rights that we never had before?

I mean the day when there is a PC in every house in the world, will we then have a "right" to a PC (and of course, to follow the same mindset of people who invent rights-based-on-convenience, some form of taxpayer coerced subsidy for that right)?

I mean we've had electricity for over a century now, but no one has a "right" to electricity no matter how "strategic" it may be, no matter how dependent people have allowed themselves to become on it. You can still survive and be free without it.

Omni, I have to disagree. Only apple has been trying to make power effective CPUs from the start. Intel and AMD have no regard for power usage / heat production, and it is currently hindering their speed production. Apple has had almost no problems making Mobile CPUs because their dies were always small and efficiant. With the exception of the G5 they have not made a power hungry chip so far. Intel is going to go down if they keep it up because thier CPUs get less and less fast and more and more sloppy. The Pentium 3 clocked at 1ghz against a 1.5 ghz Pentuim 4 clocked at 1ghz, guess who wins? The P3, why? Because Intel is all talk and worthless numbers.

As already mentioned, CPU manufacturers are already working on building smaller, more power efficient chips. I think part of the problem is that there is too much of a market for the faster, larger, less power efficient chips. The manufacturers are only doing what our money tells them to do, and thanks to gaming and all of the eye candy that keeps popping up in each new version of Windows, they are being told that speed is a priority. It isn't the CPU manufacturers that need to change, it is the market that needs to change.

As for development in other areas... The development of faster and faster processors does not result in less development in other areas. Instead, I believe that development of the faster CPUs (for gaming) is what is driving all other areas. Faster CPUs allow for more complicated and realistic games which require more and faster storage and RAM. More storage allows us to keep hold of more data which demands new ways to organise and keep track of it all which results in more complicated software being available. This software will, of course, need more ram and would benefit greatly from faster processors and more drive space. And of course there is the display. The faster processors allow for more multitasking which benefits from larger, higher resolution displays. The games don't run so well at the higher resolution, so faster processors and GPUs are needed.

If CPU speed development is halted, what might happen to everything else? If the only difference between my current processor and the next generation is the power consumption, what reason would I have to upgrade? Any change they make probably isn't going to be able to make all that large of a dent in any one person's power bill. If the speed doesn't increase all that much, if at all, from generation to generation, how are we to drive the fancy 3D games that some people seem to enjoy? How are we going to push out enough information to support displays of higher refreshes and resolutions? How are we going to handle the faster networks? What about the increasing amount of data? Are we going to be stuck with a bunch of programmers resorting to handwritten assembly in an attempt to get an acceptable amount of performance out of an application that otherwise would not be a problem with the faster processors and the improvements that come with them?