Swanson's law Swanson's law Swanson's law is the observation that the price of solar photovoltaic modules tends to drop 20 percent for every doubling of cumulative shipped volume. At present rates, costs halve about every 10 years. It is named after Richard Swanson, the founder of SunPower Corporation, a solar panel manufacturer. Swanson's law has been compared to Moore's law, which predicts the growing computing power of processors. Crystalline silicon photovoltaic cell prices have fallen from $76.67 per watt in 1977 to $0.36 per watt in 2014. Plotting the module price (in $/Wp) versus time shows a dropping by 10% per year.
Intel iAPX 432 operated as a channel controller for I/O, and an Attached Processor (AP), a conventional Intel 8086 which provided "processing power in the I/O subsystem". These were some of the largest designs of the era. The two-chip GDP had a combined count of approximately 97,000 transistors while the single chip IP had approximately 49,000. By comparison, the Motorola 68000 (introduced in 1979) had approximately 40,000 transistors. In 1983, Intel released two additional integrated circuits for the iAPX 432 Interconnect Architecture: the 43204 Bus Interface Unit (BIU) and 43205 Memory Control Unit (MCU). These chips allowed for nearly glueless multiprocessor systems with