50 Year Anniversary of Moore's Law

[Lizard]

""Moore's law" is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years." Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

So this is a thing that happened.

So far Moore's Law has proved to be right, or better than right, for every two years of computing. But with the advent of quantum computers, we may see a change in the way we interpret Moore's Law for computing power*.

Moore was (and maybe still is, I couldn't find a source) one of the founding members of Intel, the processor company. He is now a well-known philanthropist in the industry.

Many things are linked to Moore's Law, including the exponential increase in the speed of computers and the relation of relative price in comparison to computing power.

I learnt about Moore's Law properly at university, and I think it's anniversary is an important piece of technological history. Also it's cool when people predict stuff and it actually comes true.

*Quantum computers may also change the way we view Universal Turing Machines, but that's another topic!

[Glaurung]

The BBC spotted this too. Originally Moore's Law was just an observation, but it became a target for Intel and other parts of the industry. I can't think of any other technology where a fundamental aspect has evolved exponentially like this. For those interested, there's a reprint of Moore's original paper available online.

According to the BBC article, Gordon Moore co-founded Intel; he retired from the company in 1997.

[Lizard]

Thanks for the extra info; I intended this post to be the quick and dirty version, I elaborated more in my blog https://thehomelycoder.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/moores-law-turns-50/

*cough*shameless self promotion*cough*