moores-lawlisted

# Moore's Law > "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year." > — Gordon Moore, 1965 ## The core idea Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, observed in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit had been doubling roughly every year (later revised to every two years). He predicted this trend would continue. For roughly five decades, he was right — with enormous consequences for everything in computing. Processing power roughly doubled every two years, while cost per transistor fell. The smartphone in your pocket is more powerful than the most powerful computer on earth from the early 1980s. ## What Moore's Law actually explains Moore's Law isn't just a trivia fact — it's the engine behind most of what changed in computing since 1965: - **Software became possible that previously wasn't.** 3D graphics, real-time voice recognition, video streaming, machine learning — all were theoretically understood long before hardware made them practical. - **Cost curves shaped entire industries.** Cloud computing works because commodity server hardware became cheap enough that renting compute is economical. The economics of storage, bandwidth, and processing have all followed related curves. - **Developer productivity improved.** Faster hardware meant more tolerant software: higher-level languages, interpreted code, virtual machines — all "wasted" compute that Moore's Law kept providing more of. - **Planning h