Free Republic

In 1965, when he first set out what we now call Moore's Law, Gordon Moore (who later co-founded Intel) said the number of components that could be packed onto an integrated circuit would double every year or so (later amended to 18 months -- and recently amended again. In 1971, Intel's 4004 CPU had 2,300 transistors. In 1982, the 80286 debuted with 134,000 transistors. Now, run-of-the-mill CPUs count upward of 200 million transistors, and Intel is scheduled to release a processor with 1.7 billion transistors for later this year. For years, such progress in CPUs was clearly predictable: Successive generations...