Moore's Law: How did it affect smartphones?
Do you know Gordon Moore? In 1965, a California scientist noticed that the number of transistors that could fit on an integrated circuit was doubling every year.
Fifty years later, Moore's Law explains why digital cameras are starting to overtake film cameras, smartphones are so amazing, and self-driving cars are coming soon.
Gordon Moore, now a scientist emeritus at Intel, described a trend that eventually pushed an entire industry to higher and higher.
Now Gordon Moore is 86 years old, and he says that the justification for the law he formulated came around when Electronics Magazine asked him to predict the future of the transistor industry.
At the time, Moore was working for Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View, California.
He looked at integrated circuits from various brands and saw that they had eight transistors. The next year, they had 16. In Fairchild's labs, scientists were working on 30- and even 60-transistor chips.
Then Moore took a piece of paper and began to plot these numbers on a graph. This simple act showed him the ability to double his chips every year.
Moore then became the co-founder of Intel in 1968 along with Robert Noyce.
“With that in mind, we continue to double the chips every year,” he said. The most advanced chips today have 1.3 billion transistors.
His prediction became known as “Moore’s Law.” In 1975, he stated that the doubling of chips occurs every two years.
This number has remained constant ever since. Moore did not describe a physical constant, like the law of gravity, but simply observed what was happening in the world of transistors.
Fortunately for computer users everywhere, technology companies began to act as if they had to keep up with Moore's Law, doubling processing power every year or they would be left behind. Moore ended up setting the pace simply because he described it.
As Intel notes, if we tried to build an Android phone today with the transistor chips that existed in 1971, it would be the size of a parking lot.
Source: secnews.gr
