Moore’s Law

In 1965, when Fairchild Semiconductor’s Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double every year , the most advanced chips had around 60 components . In 1975, Moore–who cofounded Intel in 1968–reconsidered his prediction and revised the rate of doubling to roughly every two years. So far, history has proved him more or less right. But growth may soon slow as engineers find it harder to contend with the heat produced and power consumed by transistor-crammed chips (see “Parallel Universe”).