Comment by onan_barbarian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onan_barbarian | Hacker News Reader

GODDAMMIT, Moore never 'observed' this: "Perhaps you’ve heard of Moore’s Law. This was the observation in 1965 by the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore (pictured at the Intel Museum in 2005) that the number of transistors that could be crammed onto a chip doubles and the size of those chips tended to shrink as manufacturing technology improved on a fairly regular basis: About every 18 to 24 months."

Moore's observation was that the density yielding the minimum cost per transistor doubled with each generation (which doesn't actually predict that the density itself will double, only the point at the bottom of the cost curve will move to 2x density), not that the density doubled or that everything got 2x MOAR AWESUM in some random way.

Yes, it's sad, but it's true. The number of mis-statements of Moore's Law in the computing press will double every 18 to 24 months.

Moore wrote a paper in 1965 that was the first reference to anything in semiconductors doubling every N months, but he also wrote wrote many other papers and speeches before the term "Moore's Law" came into use, and in some of them he talked about feature sizes shrinking every N months. So if you want to be pedantic you could say that the 1965 paper wan't actually referring to "Moore's Law" and that it was really formulated later, but there's no reason to say that modern usage is a misstatement.

See this paper for a good historical overview: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1677462

Well, yes and no. You can read the original 1965 paper that birthed the theory here:

ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf

Cost is certainly one of his concerns, but the original "law" has much to do with actually cramming more circuits onto a board.

Moore's Law has become synonymous with any technology getting faster/smaller/cheaper logarithmically.

There are several exponential growth laws in computer science: for example, Nielsen's law for bandwidth, Kryder's law for storage. It's misleading to address them all as Moore's.

Also (George) Gilder's law.

It's also important to note:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2040593

It's less a misstatement and more a generalization. Stuff getting exponentially faster or cheaper is a very powerful idea.

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