What is "Moore's Law"?
Now that we're in the era of people wondering if Moore's Law is ending it's probably worth looking a little bit at what Moore's law really is. Way back in 1965 Gordon Moore of Intel publish a paper showing that as the years went by the number of transistors you could economically cram onto a piece of silicon went up. The more transistors per chip the cheaper it was to make the chip but at the same time the greater the chance that one of those transistors would have a defect and the whole chip would have to be thrown out. Between those two forces there was a happy medium number of transistors that would get you the most compute for you buck, and Moore observed in 1965 that that happy medium number of components tended to double every year with improving technology. He also observed that with decreasing device size the power used per transistor would decrease and that the overall power consumption would remain manageable despite the explosion in the number of ...