Moore's Law

Moore's Law Prediction of Computer Chips Performance

According to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every 18 months or so. This prediction was conceived by Gordon Moore, co-founder and former chairman of Intel Corporation.

When Intel's co-founder predicted in 1965 that as the number of transistors on a chip doubles, performance also doubles, he thought it would hold true for about 10 years. Well, it's way past the millennium and we know that the computer chips have been shrinking, with increased performances in computers.

Gordon Moore is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation, famous for Moore's Law. Under him, Intel introduced the world's first single chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004 invented by Intel engineers. Born in San Francisco on January 3, 1929, Gordon Earle Moore earned a bachelor's in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950 and a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1954.



In 1965,  Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors the industry would be able to place on a computer a microchip that would double every year. Eventually to become known as Moore's Law, his prediction was published in an article in Electronics magazine , dated April 19, 1965. In 1995, he updated his prediction to once every two years. While originally intended as a rule of thumb, Moore's Law became the guiding principle for the industry to deliver more powerful semiconductor chips; at proportionate decreases in cost.  His prediction was established as he observed an exponential growth in the number of transistors per silicon chip.

Some statistical data:

• In 1971, the first Intel chip, known as 400, had 2300 transistors.

• In 1982, the number of transistors increased to 120,000 in the 286

• In 1993, the number increased to 3.1 million in the Pentium

• In 2000, the number increased to 42 million  in Pentium 4.

Meantime, the size of the chip has been shrinking in which the microchip has become the nanochip, a chip with a width of a human hair or 100 nanometres.  Prediction is that by 2020 these chips would be able to pack as many as 10,000 million transistors.

Some scientists predict that Moore’s Law cannot continue unchanged for more than 600 years for any technological civilization. Interestingly, Moore thought it would hold true for about 10 years when he first made his prediction.  Today, this exponential growth pattern  has continued allowing computers to become both cheaper and more powerful.


Image Credit:  David Carron, Wiki Commons