Gordon E. Moore is the visionary co founder of Intel who famously said in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. Around that time the state of the art chip made by the fledgling Intel had about two thousand transistors. That was considered remarkable. The latest Intel chips have more than five hundred million transistors. That is astounding.
I can still remember my first transistor radio. They were rare then. I took it apart (and put it back together again). I contained just a few transistors. Each were large and very visible. The transistors in modern Intel chips require powerful microscopes to be seen.
Over the years Gordon Moore has expressed surprise that his 1965 statement has been repeated and called a law. He has also has expressed surprise that it has remained true all this time.
At this years developers conference in San Francisco he gave reasons why it must come to an end. He said the limits lay in basic laws of physics such as the speed of light and the size of atoms. He thinks his law will finally come to an end in about 10 to 15 years.
He may be right, but he has said similar things in the past and his own company has surprised everyone by finding new ways of doing things. The current generation of chips uses insulating layers just 5 molecules thick. It is not long ago that was thought to be impossible. Only time will reveal if Moore's Law will continue to confound its inventor.
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