Moore's Law visualised

 

Last week, a photo from my social media feeds perfectly illustrated Moore's Law. It shows a computer being manhandled into a local government building in 1957. A little Internet sleuthing revealed that it was an Elliot Series 405, revealing its full spec. These English business computers were 32-bit and had 8k of memory. That's not the entire computer; there were bulky peripherals, and a typical installation cost around £85,000. That's about $1,094,915 (USD) in today's value.

The computer below, shown against the same building, is a Raspberry Pi. Even a base model has 1GB of RAM, costing $100 or less. The photo is a beautiful illustration of Moore's Law, named after the late Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, who observed that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Moore's Second Law also noted that the price fell.

Making transistors in a vacuum - Moore's Law

Moore's Law, named after Gordon Moore the co-founder of Intel, states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. This allows our computers to get faster and faster whilst costing us less. We've enjoyed the benefits of this phenomena since the integrated circuit was invented in the 1950's. However, recently we've started to run up against the physical limitations of miniaturizing these circuits. Put simply you can't continue to miniaturize for ever as eventually you come down to circuits the size of atoms.
    Wired reports that a company, called Applied Materials in Santa Clara California (aka Silicon Valley), has perfected a technique for creating transistors  that are "22 nanometers wide, as opposed to the current standard of about 45 nanometers." So it seems that Moore's Law may be safe for a few more years yet. You can read about the entire process in the Wired article.

Moore's Law

I came across this photo yesterday which really puts Moore's Law into perspective.

Moore's Law states that: "the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years". The picture compares the spec of the iMac from 2000 to the iPhone in 2010 showing that iPhone is more powerful, much smaller and cheaper.