While at the Boston SNUG conference yesterday, I ran into John Biggs of ARM
who told me of some of the cutting edge power research they had been working
on over at ARM R&D in Cambridge, England.  Starting with:

                                      Work
                             Power = ------
                                      Time

Plus everyone knows

                              Time = Money

And that

                         Knowledge = Power

Doing the simple substitutions gets

                                      Work
                         Knowledge = -------
                                      Money

And with a little algebra, you get the Biggs Equation:

                                        Work
                             Money = -----------
                                      Knowledge

The Biggs Equation tells you a lot.  First off, in the steady state, if you
do an average amount of work with an average amount of knowledge, you get an
average amount of money.  No surprises there.  Where it gets interesting is
in the extreme cases.

For example, if you're an engineer, you have a lot of knowledge, so this
equation now easily explains why engineers must do an excessive amount of
work (to cancel out their knowledge) if they want to make a lot of money.

Conversely, if you're an executive, you have a lot of money.  One quick look
at the Biggs Equation and it's obvious executives do a lot of work with very
little knowledge.  In fact, the less a VP or CEO actually knows, the more
money he or she will make; with the wealthiest ones knowing next to nothing.

In addition, the Biggs Equation readily explains why teenagers (who do no
work, but know everything) are always complaining about having no money.


Ending on a more chip centric note, John Biggs' Boston SNUG 2006 paper
titled "Aggressive Leakage Management in ARM Based Systems" yesterday won
3rd place in the user votes for best paper at the conference.  My congrats.