Herb Grosch
Herbert Reuben John Grosch (September 13, 1918 – January 18, 2010) was an early computer scientist, perhaps best known for Grosch's law, which he formulated in 1950. Grosch's Law is an aphorism that states "economy is as the square root of th ...
in 1953:
I believe that there is a fundamental rule, which I modestly call ''Grosch's law'', giving added economy only as the square root of the increase in speed — that is, to do a calculation ten times as cheaply you must do it hundred times as fast.
This
adage
A proverb (from ) or an adage is a simple, traditional saying that expresses a perceived truth based on common sense or experience. Proverbs are often metaphorical and are an example of formulaic speech, formulaic language. A proverbial phrase ...
is more commonly stated as
Computer performance increases as the square of the cost. If computer A costs twice as much as computer B, you should expect computer A to be four times as fast as computer B.
Two years before Grosch's statement,
Seymour Cray
Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) – was an American
economies of scale
In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to their scale of operation, and are typically measured by the amount of Productivity, output produced per unit of cost (production cost). A decrease in ...
: the more costly is the computer, the
price–performance ratio
In economics, engineering, business management and marketing the price–performance ratio is often written as cost–performance, cost–benefit or capability/price (C/P), refers to a product's ability to deliver performance, of any sort, for i ...
linearly becomes better. This implies that low-cost computers cannot compete in the market.
An analysis of rental cost/performance data for computers between 1951 and 1963 by Kenneth E. Knight found that Grosch's law held for commercial and scientific operations (a modern analysis of the same data found that Grosch's law only applied to commercial operations). In a separate study, Knight found that Grosch's law did not apply to computers between 1963 and 1967 (also confirmed by the aforementioned modern analysis).
See also
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Metcalfe's law
Metcalfe's law states that the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (2). The law is named after Robert Metcalfe and was first proposed in 1980 ...
*
Moore's law
Moore's law is the observation that the Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...