Hi! Can somebody help me understand Moore’s law and its implications? I know it has something to do with microchips but I didn’t really understand it when I searched it up.
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It’s simply an observation. Moore noticed that transistors would roughly halve in size every year, meaning you could fit twice as many on a chip of a certain size. He predicted that this would continue for another decade. A decade later, he revised the prediction to doubling every two years.
His prediction was mostly accurate for about 40 years. Transistors got smaller and chips got faster. But now transistors are getting so small that they can’t get any smaller. Moore’s Law has effectively been broken.
Calling it Moore’s Law is a misnomer. It’s not a law. There’s no rule that says transistors *have* to get smaller, it’s just a conjecture.
very simply, Moores law is an observation made in the mid 1960s that the amount of stuff they could fit on a single circuit board (and, by extension, the processing power) was doubling every 18-24 months.
this observation remained true basically for the whole 60 years since the comment was made. in that time, computers have increased in power roughly 1,073,741,824 times.
theirs been talk of how we are reaching the limits of this and soon the pace will slow, and it has a little….but people have been saying that for like 20 years.
Sure! Moore’s Law is a principle that states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years
Essentially, it means that microchips become more powerful and smaller with time
So, it’s like technology getting better and better really quickly!
Moore’s law isn’t a law, it’s just an artificial target made from observation of the silicon industry.
It’s like your boss setting up a sales target based on achieved results from previous years. It’s surprising that the industry managed to keep up and deliver that target consistently for the past half century, good job fellas.
part 1) gordon moore noticed it took about 18 months for the next smaller transistor size to show up on the market.
part 2) the chip is say 10mmx10mm and if each transistor takes 1mm square, then you can fit 100 transistors on the chip. ie 10 across by 10 down = 100
if you cut the size by 1/2 ie you get 20×20 or 400! cut it again you have 1600 transistors. and cut again you get really fast growth.
his genius was recognizing the economics of that and exploiting it by planning well over the long term … and being in the right place at the right time with the right product!
today and at some point the transistors are so small it is at the atomic atom level
OP, I’ve had a relevant argument with my (“boomer,” lol) Dad. My response to his whine “Why do I need to replace my (10+ year old) iPad?”
Well, Moore’s “law” implies that CPUs will effectively double in speed every two years (as other’s have noted, this is a side effect of the transistor density doubling). So, a modern iPad will be 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 (counts, yep that’s 10), or 2^10, or 1024 times faster than what you have. At least!
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