Moore's Law & the Exponential
Gordon Moore · 1965
"Moore observed in 1965 that the number of components per chip was doubling every year (a rate he revised to every two years in 1975) — an exponential that held long enough to make the future systematically cheaper to compute than the present, and to make exponential thinking the required default for tech strategy."
Moore plotted five data points in 1965 and drew a line that steered every chip roadmap for the next 50 years: components per chip doubling every year — revised to every two years in 1975 — at roughly the same cost.
An exponential with a 2-year doubling feels linear early, then bends sharply — humans extrapolate linearly and are surprised late. Moore's law is not physics but coordinated expectation: fabs, EDA, and software all invested against the line, making it self-fulfilling until quantum and economic limits bite. The strategic move is not faster chips per se but what becomes free when compute is 100× cheaper: search, video, and now inference were born when their cost crossed that exponential threshold.
Why did Moore's 1965 observation become a coordination device, not just a forecast?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits (Moore, 1965) overviewGordon Moore / Wikipedia
TCP/IP & the End-to-End Principle
"Cerf and Kahn designed the internet to be dumb at the core and smart at the edges — reliability and intelligence live in endpoints, not in the network — which is why the same packet fabric could absorb every application since without redesign."