Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

by Richard L. Currier

In 1965, Gordon Moore, cofounder of the Intel Corporation, published a now-famous article in the magazine Electronics entitled “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.” In this article, Moore predicted that ten years in the future (i.e., by 1975) as many as sixty-five thousand electronic components would be fabricated on a single microchip. “I believe,” he added confidently, “that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.” Years later, when Moore’s prediction had proven unnervingly prophetic, the phenomenon he described was dubbed “Moore’s Law.” It states that the number of components contained in a single microchip—and thus its processing speed and power—will double approximately every two years. Yet Moore’s Law turns out to have been, if anything, slightly conservative, as Moore himself had guessed.3 Since 1965, the processing power of the microchip has doubled almost every eighteen months, and in 2014, Intel announced the 15-Core Xeon E7 v2, an integrated circuit with more than 4.3 billion transistors on a single microchip roughly the size of a soda cracker.