in clock frequency have grown more slowly over the past few years, compared to power reduction improvements. This has been driven by the end of Moore's Law and demand for longer battery life and reductions in size for mobile technology. This change in focus from higher clock rates to power consumption and miniaturization can be shown by the significant reductions in power consumption, as much as 50%, that were reported by Intel in their release of the Haswell microarchitecture; where they dropped their power consumption benchmark from 30 to 40 watts down to 10-20 watts. Comparing this to the processing speed increase of 3 GHz to 4 GHz (2002 to 2006) it can be seen that the focus in research and development is shifting away from clock frequency and moving towards consuming less power and taking up less space. See also References Sources Barton, Robert S., "Functional Design of Computers", Communications of the ACM 4(9): 405 (1961). Barton, Robert S., "A New Approach to the Functional Design of a Digital Computer", Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference, May 1961, pp. 393–396. About the design of the Burroughs B5000 computer. Bell, C. Gordon; and Newell, Allen (1971). "Computer Structures: Readings and Examples", McGraw-Hill. Blaauw, G.A., and Brooks, F.P., Jr., "The Structure of System/360, Part I-Outline of the Logical Structure", IBM Systems Journal, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 119–135, 1964. External links ISCA: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture Micro: IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture HPCA: International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture ASPLOS: International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization IEEE Transactions on Computers The von Neumann Architecture of Computer Systems Central processing unit