in addition to our rapid adaptation to all of the change around us—which I address in chapter 9 —what should surprise us is that there are regularities in these changes in technological knowledge. It’s not random and it’s not erratic. There is a pattern, and it affects many of the facts that surround us, even ones that don’t necessarily seem to deal with technology. The first example of this? Moore’s Law.
. . .
WE all at least have heard of Moore’s Law. It deals with the rapid doubling of computer processing power. But what exactly is it and how did it come about? Gordon Moore, of the eponymous law, is a retired chemist and physicist as well as the cocreator of the Intel Corporation. He founded Intel in 1968 with Robert Noyce, who helped invent the integrated circuit, the core of every modern computer. But Moore wasn’t famous or fabulously wealthy when he developed his law. In fact, he hadn’t even founded Intel yet. Three years before, Moore wrote a short paper in the journal
Electronics
entitled, “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.”
In this paper Moore predicted the number of components that it would be possible to place on a single circuit in the years 1970 and 1975. He argued that growth would continue to increase at the same rate. Essentially, Moore’s Law states that the processing power of a single chip or circuit will double every year. He didn’t arrive at this conclusion through exhaustive amounts of data gathering and analysis; in fact, he based his law on only four data points.
The incredible thing is that he was right. This law has held roughly true since 1965, even as more and more data have been added to the simple picture he examined. While with more data we now know that the period for doubling is closer to eighteen months than a year, the principle stands. It has weathered the personal computer revolution, the march from 286 to 486 to Pentium, and the many advances since then. Just as in science, we have experienced an exponential rise in technological advances over time: Processing power grows every year at a constant
rate
rather than by a constant amount. And according to the original formulation, the annual rate of growth is about 200 percent.
Moore’s Law hasn’t simply affected our ability to make more and more calculations more easily. Many other developments occur as an outgrowth of this pattern. When processing power doubles rapidly it allows much more to be possible. For example, thenumber of pixels that digital cameras can process has increased directly due to the regularity of Moore’s Law.
But it gets even more interesting. If you generalize Moore’s Law from chips to simply thinking about information technology and processing power in general, Moore’s Law becomes the latest in a long line of technical rules of thumb that explain extremely regular change in technology.
What does this mean? Let’s first take the example of processing power. Rather than simply focusing on the number of components on an integrated circuit, we can think more broadly. What do these components do? They enable calculations to occur. So if we measure calculations per second, or calculations per second at a given cost (which is the kind of thing that might be useful when looking at affordable personal computers), we can ignore the specific underlying technologies that enable these things to happen and instead focus on what they are designed to do.
Chris Magee set out to do exactly that. Magee is a professor at MIT in the Engineering Systems Division, an interdisciplinary department that defies any sort of simple description. It draws people from lots of different areas—physics, computer science, engineering, even aerospace science. But the common denominator is that all of these people think about complex systems—from traffic to health care—from the perspectives of engineering, management science, and the quantitative social sciences.
Magee, along with
. . .
WE all at least have heard of Moore’s Law. It deals with the rapid doubling of computer processing power. But what exactly is it and how did it come about? Gordon Moore, of the eponymous law, is a retired chemist and physicist as well as the cocreator of the Intel Corporation. He founded Intel in 1968 with Robert Noyce, who helped invent the integrated circuit, the core of every modern computer. But Moore wasn’t famous or fabulously wealthy when he developed his law. In fact, he hadn’t even founded Intel yet. Three years before, Moore wrote a short paper in the journal
Electronics
entitled, “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.”
In this paper Moore predicted the number of components that it would be possible to place on a single circuit in the years 1970 and 1975. He argued that growth would continue to increase at the same rate. Essentially, Moore’s Law states that the processing power of a single chip or circuit will double every year. He didn’t arrive at this conclusion through exhaustive amounts of data gathering and analysis; in fact, he based his law on only four data points.
The incredible thing is that he was right. This law has held roughly true since 1965, even as more and more data have been added to the simple picture he examined. While with more data we now know that the period for doubling is closer to eighteen months than a year, the principle stands. It has weathered the personal computer revolution, the march from 286 to 486 to Pentium, and the many advances since then. Just as in science, we have experienced an exponential rise in technological advances over time: Processing power grows every year at a constant
rate
rather than by a constant amount. And according to the original formulation, the annual rate of growth is about 200 percent.
Moore’s Law hasn’t simply affected our ability to make more and more calculations more easily. Many other developments occur as an outgrowth of this pattern. When processing power doubles rapidly it allows much more to be possible. For example, thenumber of pixels that digital cameras can process has increased directly due to the regularity of Moore’s Law.
But it gets even more interesting. If you generalize Moore’s Law from chips to simply thinking about information technology and processing power in general, Moore’s Law becomes the latest in a long line of technical rules of thumb that explain extremely regular change in technology.
What does this mean? Let’s first take the example of processing power. Rather than simply focusing on the number of components on an integrated circuit, we can think more broadly. What do these components do? They enable calculations to occur. So if we measure calculations per second, or calculations per second at a given cost (which is the kind of thing that might be useful when looking at affordable personal computers), we can ignore the specific underlying technologies that enable these things to happen and instead focus on what they are designed to do.
Chris Magee set out to do exactly that. Magee is a professor at MIT in the Engineering Systems Division, an interdisciplinary department that defies any sort of simple description. It draws people from lots of different areas—physics, computer science, engineering, even aerospace science. But the common denominator is that all of these people think about complex systems—from traffic to health care—from the perspectives of engineering, management science, and the quantitative social sciences.
Magee, along with
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