After coming across a cool post on Google Ngrams by Randall Munroe, I decided to try it on something relevant to my research.

I started with the synchronous vs asynchronous face-off and got a somewhat expected result where asynchronous is catching up with synchronous:

Then, I searched for something more subtle: latency vs throughput vs energy efficiency, and got this:

To clarify the terms:

Latency is the delay from receiving an input data to producing the corresponding output.

Throughput is a rate of receiving inputs and producing outputs. A pipelined system can have a very high throughput despite having a large latency for a single data frame.

Energy efficiency is how much energy is spent per data frame.

The result looks interesting. People first wrote mostly about latency — it used to be the most important characteristic of a system. Then they moved to discussing throughput, and now we see that these terms are in decline, while energy efficiency climbs upwards. It is time to be energy-efficient!