|
A principle established in 1975 by
Gordon Moore, Co-founder of Intel, describing the rapid growth in the power
of computer microprocessors. Officially, Moore's Law states that the circuit
density or capacity of semiconductor chips doubles every 18 months, or
quadruples every three years. (Moore's original 1965 article in Electronics
an American magazine, observed that the complexity of such chips roughly
doubled every year, but he revised his predictions a decade later.) So far,
it has proved to be not just an accurate measure of the development of
computer chips but also a barometer for an entire industry.
Moore himself predicts that his law will run out of steam in 2012,
when 1 billion transistors will be squeezed on to a processor and the limits
of current chip fabrication technology are finally reached. Variants of it
have been applied to everything from software to the web, both of which have
grown even faster than the processors they rely on. The web grew from 10,000
sites at the beginning of 1995 to somewhere in excess of 35m by early 2003. |
