Moore’s law really is dead this time

Gordon Moore's original graph, showing projected transistor counts, long before the term "Moore's law" was coined. (credit: Intel)

Moore's law has died at the age of 51 after an extended illness.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that the number of components in integrated circuits was doubling every 12 months or so. Moreover, as this site wrote extensively about in 2003, that the number of transistors per chip that resulted in the lowest price per transistor was doubling every 12 months. In 1965, this meant that 50 transistors per chip offered the lowest per-transistor cost; Moore predicted that by 1970, this would rise to 1,000 components per chip, and that the price per transistor would drop by 90 percent.

With a little more data and some simplification, this observation became "Moore's law": the number of transistors per chip would double every 12 months.

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments