Moore's Law

[rtroxel]

Did you ever wonder why it's cheaper to buy a new PC than to repair the one you have? Come to think of it, it's often cheaper to by a new telephone, radio or DVD player than to repair your broken one.

The answer to this question is that these are all digital devices which follow Moore's Law.

In 1965, electronics engineer Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled each year since the integrated circuit had been invented (in 1961). Additionally, he predicted that this trend would continue indefinitely.

(Moore went on to be a co-founder of Intel, so in a sense, he helped prove his own prediction.)

The actual statistics run like this:

• 1985 - 386 Processor - 275,000 transistors
• 1989 - 486 DX Processor - 1,180,000 transistors
• 1993 - Pentium Processor - 3,100,000 transistors
• 1997 - Pentium II Processor - 7,500,000 transistors
• 1999 - Pentium III Processor - 24,000,000 transistors
• 2000 - Pentium 4 Processor - 42,000,000 transistors

With this continuing increase in transistors, chips in the future may be able to include advanced hard-wired software for communications, graphics and networking, and maybe even an entire operating system!

Today, chip manufacturers and other IT companies take Moore's Law to mean that every 1.5 years, the computing speed of a microchip doubles. A corollary to this is that if a device or process can be digitized, then it follows Moore's Law.