What is Moore's Law?

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Moore's Law: "The observation that the number of transistors on computer chips doubles approximately every two years."

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The law is named after Gordon Earl Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and later CEO of the latter).

The chart above shows Moore’s original graph that he drew in 1965 to describe this regularity. At the time, he had only a handful of data points. Note that he drew it on a logarithmic scale, and remember that a straight line on a log-axis means that the growth rate is constant and it is therefore showing the exponential growth of the number of transistors.

However, he hypothesized that this relationship would continue at a similar rate: “There is no reason to believe it will not remain constant for at least 10 years”.

It means that, though he had only a handful of data points from 1959 till 1965, he predicted that this will go on for at least 10 years until 1975.

Not only did his prediction hold true till 1975, but it has been more or less followed till 2022!

The famous graph below shows this:

Note that the values to the left are in logarithmic scale, which means that the straight line on the graph indicates the relationship between Transistor Count and Years is Exponential and not Linear.

What's remarkable is that Moore never said it as an experimental law. He just gave his opinion and that too for 1965 - 1976. And it apparently just held true for 50+ years!

Click Linear and Log below to witness the true power of HTML, CSS and JS:

Today I learnt that if a graph looks like this in Linear Scale:

Then it will look like a straight line in the Logarithmic Scale:

Never knew this after YEARS of learning Science and Technology!