2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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Moore's Law
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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/morz law/ , prov. Any one of several similar folk theorems that fit
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computing capacity or cost to a 2 t exponential curve, with doubling time
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close to a year. The most common fits component density to such a curve
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(previous versions of this entry gave that form). Another variant asserts
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that the dollar cost of constant computing power decreases on the same
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curve. The original Moore's Law, first uttered in 1965 by semiconductor
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engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four years later), spoke of the
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number of components on the lowest-cost silicon integrated circuits but
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Moore's own formulation varied somewhat over the years, and reconstructing
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the meaning of the terminology he used in the original turns out to be
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fraught with difficulties. Further variants were spawned by Intel's PR
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department and various journalists. It has been shown that none of the
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variants of Moore's Law actually fit the data very well (the price curves
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within DRAM generations perhaps come closest). Nevertheless, Moore's Law is
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constantly invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of
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computing technology. See also Parkinson's Law of Data and Gates's Law.
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