In 1965 an engineer named Gordon Moore - a co-founder of the company Intel - noticed something strange. The number of tiny electronic switches called transistors that engineers could fit onto a single computer chip was doubling about every two years. He guessed it would keep doubling for at least another decade. He was very wrong about the “decade” part. It kept doubling for over half a century.
A 1971 Intel chip held 2,300 transistors. By 1990 chips had a million. By 2000, 40 million. By 2010, over a billion. Modern chips squeeze more than 100 billion transistors into a square smaller than a fingernail. People call this pattern Moore’s Law.
That’s why your phone is more powerful than the supercomputers that helped send humans to the Moon, and why a video game console today does what only Hollywood studios could do thirty years ago. Engineers are starting to bump into the physics of atoms, though, so Moore’s Law may finally be slowing down.
