Gordon Moore of Intel suggested in 1965 that the number of transistors that would fit onto an integrated circuit would double every year. He later suggested that the doubling would occur every 2 years rather than 1. Historically the doubling has occurred every 18 months delivering a multiple of 10 (i.e. an order of magnitude improvement) every 6 years. Moore never suggested that the doubling would persist until 2005, but it did.

How did it happen?

Technically, the mechanism for doubling the speed was simple; you shrank the size of the circuit. Printing circuits onto silicon is a “photographic” process and over time the shrinking was achieved by reducing the wavelength of the “electromagnetic radiation” (infrared, light, ultraviolet, x-rays etc.). The engineers kept encountering obstacles to doing this, but they overcame them until recently (2005/6) when Moore’s Law ceased to deliver in this way.

Now CPU power is being increased primarily by adding multiple cores to the same chip. Only small gains in reducing circuit size are now being achieved.

What does Moore’s Law cover?

The reality is that once Moore’s law got going all the associated components of a computer started to improve at a similar rate; memory, controllers, switches, buses, memory, disk, etc. However they did not march in step. Thus the speed of CPU would be ahead of memory speed. If Moore’s Law stops completely then there will be efficiency gains as all the components of a computer start to harmonize.

Note also that Moore’s Law improvements also apply to communications, so fiber bandwidth also increases exponentially and so does wireless bandwidth.

What is the Impact?

There are too many impacts to even try to list here, but there is an overriding one that deserves mention. Moore’s Law has created a pattern of repeating obsolescence in the computing device market (where devices include Servers, PCs, PDAs, Mobile phones, etc.) And as each of these devices become more powerful it encourages convergence in the hardware domain and the software domain. It is, particularly, driving the convergence of computing and communications.

Its greatest impact is not in the doubling but in the 6 year cycle that delivers a 10x improvement every 6 years. 10x is commonly referred to as “an order of magnitude”. Put simply, if something is 10 times larger than something else, the “something else” appears insignificant. The 10x effect means that an application that will only just work on current computer hardware, will be handled easily in 6 years time and in 12 years time, everyone will have the computing power to run the application (no matter what it is).

Note: This is a key IT Trends posting that I will probably refer back to, to discuss various business events as they occur in the IT market. A list of such postings can be found here:

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