What is Moore's Law?
Moore's law is a term used in the computer industry that refers to the doubling of processing power that occurs about every two years.
History of Moore's Law
Moore's law is an observation of a trend coined by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel. Moore first describes this phenomenon in a 1965 paper detailing the future of electronics and circuits. Moore's law, while not a precise quantitative measurement, is used by many semiconductor industries and research institutions to set goals for hardware development. Some years, computer hardware develops faster than expected, other years it's slower. Even Moore was surprised when his idle comment on the future of computers became a respected and cited phrase.
More specifically, Moore says the number of transistors on a circuit doubles every two years. Transistors are the electronic switches that do the calculating on a computer chip. Add more transistors, and a computer chip can process more information.
At the time Gordon Moore and Intel were manufacturing computer chips, technology was advancing that allowed Intel and other chip manufacturers the ability to make transistors smaller, thereby being able to place more of them on a single chip. Chips with more transistors could perform faster calculations, and as the number of transistors on a chip doubled, the power of the computing chip kept pace.
To pack more transistors on a chip, Intel and other chip makers used technology that allowed them to shrink the size of a transistor so more of them would fit on a single chip. And for the most part, the cost of making a single chip with more transistors isn't any greater than the cost of making one with fewer transistors. As a result, we see more powerful chips for the same price. With each new generation of computer chips, there's more power, about double what there was two years ago. And the chips that were made last year become less expensive, reducing the cost of using computer chips.
Is Moore's Law going to last forever?
From 1965 to 2015, our processing power has doubled approximately 25 times, That means a computer chip made in 2015 is 3,355,4432 times the processing power in 1965. That's a massive increase in processing power and the continuous improvement in computer technology reflects that.
Because of this historic doubling of processing power, advancements in technology from smartphones to digital cameras have been possible, along with more complex computing tasks like weather forecasting.
In April of 2016, Brian Krzanich, the CEO of Intel, was quoted saying “In my 34 years in the semiconductor industry, I have witnessed the advertised death of Moores'Law no less than four times” In 2017 he said “I am here today to really show you that Moore's Law is alive and well and flourishing.”
These quotes are the result of the ability to increasingly shrink the size of transistors about every two years and the result of other advancements that have allowed Intel and other computer chip makers to increase the calculating performance of a computer chip continuously.
While it's likely that at some point Moore's Law and the doubling of processing power will be limited, we will see other technologies that will enable increasing computing performance.
To my way of thinking
While we might not see a doubling of computing power on a single chip every two years or so, technology is driving improvements so we will see increasing computer power as the demand for computing capability always seems to grow. And as we gain access to this power, who knows what applications and uses there will be to take advantage of it.
Website:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/moores-law-technology.html