The exponential trend that has gained the greatest public recognition has become known as Moore’s Law. In the mid-1970s, Gordon Moore, a leading inventor of integrated circuits and later chairman of Intel, observed that we could squeeze twice as many transistors onto an integrated circuit every twenty-four months (in the mid-1960s, he had estimated twelve months). Given that the electrons would consequently have less distance to travel, circuits would also run faster, providing an additional boost to overall computational power. The result is exponential growth in the price-performance of
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