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Unit 5: Business Hardware Software and IT Infrastructure

5.3.1 Moore’s Law and Micro-processing Power Notes

In 1965, Gordon Moore, the director of Fairchild Semiconductor’s Research and Development
Laboratories, an early manufacturer of integrated circuits, wrote in Electronics magazine that
since the first microprocessor chip was introduced in 1959, the number of components on a chip
with the smallest manufacturer costs per component (generally transistors) had doubled each
year. This assertion became the foundation of Moore’s Law. Moore later reduced the rate of
growth to a doubling every two years. This law would later be interpreted in multiple ways.
There are at least three variations of Moore’s Law, none of which Moore ever stated:
1. The power of microprocessors doubles every 18 months (Tuomi, 2002);
2. Computing power doubles every 18 months; and
3. The price of computing falls by half every 18 months.
Figure 5.3 illustrates the relationship between number of transistors on a microprocessor and
Millions of Instructions Per Second (MIPS), a common measure of processor power. Figure 5.3
shows the exponential decline in the cost of transistors and rise in computing power.

Figure 5.3: Moore's Law and Microprocessor Performance

There is reason to believe the exponential growth in the number of transistors and the power of
processors coupled with an exponential decline in computing costs will continue into the future.
Chip manufacturers continue to miniaturize components. Intel has recently changed its
manufacturing process from 0.13-micron component size (a micron is a millionth of a meter),
introduced in 2002, to a newer 90-nanometer process in 2004 (a nanometer is a billionth of a
meter). With a size of about 50 nanometers, today’s transistors should no longer be compared to
the size of a human hair but rather to the size of a virus, the smallest form of organic life.
Figure 5.4: Falling Cost of Chips

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