An Interview With Linus Torvalds (TechCrunch)

There is still hope for Quiet Computing (I think I should trademark this term). Moore's law can go two ways: ever faster hardware or ever more efficient hardware. The industry is still mostly obsessed about speed, but fortunately the "power wall" forced them to think about efficiency as well. But my humble opinion is that the hardware is already fast enough and have been for quite some time (for desktops, at least, absent special requirements). I have a pretty old 2-core Athlon64 and it's fast enough for everything I need to do; if I could get a CPU with the same performance but 10 times more power-efficient, I would happily buy it, especially if it allows me to throw out the CPU fan :) I already have a fan-less GPU and GPUs are historically more power hungry than CPUs.