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Liter of fuel would last UK 1 year if cars had kept pace with computers

One liter of fuel would supply the UK enough energy for an entire year if efficiency in the car industry had risen at the same rate as it did in computer technology, according to the calculations made by highly regarded British computer scientist.

The efficiency gains would have extended the life of the UK’s current oil reserves for the entire life span of the solar system.

Professor Steve Furber, a professor of computer engineering at the University of Manchester, mentioned the calculation in the inaugural Kilburn Lecture last week to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Baby computer’s construction at the university.

Furber noted that computers are now 50 billion times more energy-efficient than the ‘Baby’, which weighed roughly one ton and filled an entire room. Furber also focused on the Grand Challenges for the next two decades of computing research, including attempts to model significant components of complex brain functions. Furber said:

“Biological systems demonstrate many of the properties we aspire to incorporate into our engineered technology, so perhaps that suggests a possible source of ideas that we could seek to incorporate into future novel computation systems. Current research at Manchester into the development of the ‘Brain Box’ computer is a contribution to the computing Grand Challenge of ‘Understanding the Architecture of Brain and Mind’, and will provide a platform for the investigation of these important issues that face the microchip industry in the near future.”