Moore's law

Moore's law

1

Moore's law

Plot of CPU transistor counts against dates of introduction. Note the logarithmic vertical

scale; the line corresponds to exponential growth with transistor count doubling every two

years.

An Osborne Executive portable computer, from

1982 with a Zilog Z80 4MHz CPU, and a 2007

Apple iPhone with a 412MHz ARM11 CPU. The

over the history of computing

hardware, the number of transistors on

integrated circuits doubles

approximately every two years. The

period often quoted as "18 months" is

due to Intel executive David House,

who predicted that period for a

doubling in chip performance (being a

transistors and their being faster).

circuits had doubled every year from

the invention of the integrated circuit

in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that

the trend would continue "for at least

ten years".

[5]

His prediction has proven

to be uncannily accurate, in part

because the law is now used in the

semiconductor industry to guide

(see Other formulations and similar

laws). This exponential improvement

has dramatically enhanced the impact

of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.

[8]

Moore's law describes a driving force of

Moore's law

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History

The term "Moore's law" was coined around 1970 by the Caltech

professor, VLSI pioneer, and entrepreneur Carver Mead in reference

to a statement by Gordon E. Moore.

increases in computer power had existed years prior. Alan Turing in

A New York Times article published August 31, 2009, credits

Engelbart as having made the prediction in 1959.

[16]

Moore's original statement that transistor counts had doubled every year can be found in his publication "Cramming

more components onto integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine 19 April 1965:

in performance every 18€months.

[20]

Intel.

Moore's law

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Other formulations and similar laws

exponential growth.

components. Moore himself wrote only

about the density of components (or

Transistors per integrated circuit.

complex chips. The graph at the top

shows this trend holds true today.

continue into this decade for even denser chips, with minimum features approaching 10 nanometers. Excimer laser

lithography has thus played a critical role in the continued advance of Moore's Law for the last 20 years.

[26]

Hard disk storage cost per unit of information. A similar law (sometimes called Kryder's Law) has held for hard

disk storage cost per unit of information.

[27]

The rate of progression in disk storage over the past decades has

actually sped up more than once, corresponding to the utilization of error correcting codes, the magnetoresistive

effect and the giant magnetoresistive effect. The current rate of increase in hard drive capacity is roughly similar to

the rate of increase in transistor count. Recent trends show that this rate has been maintained into 2007.

[28]

result, the wholesale price of data traffic collapsed in the dot-com bubble. Nielsen's Law says that the bandwidth

available to users increases by 50% annually.