Created Mar 2, 2000 | Updated Jan 13, 2012

Moore's Law

Proposed by Gordon Moore in 1965, Moore's law states that CPUs¹ will double their processing power every 18 months. Moore was basing his prediction on major improvements in manufacturing technology.

Incredibly, this law (really a prediction) has now been correct for over three decades and is still going strong, particularly in the PC arena where the size of a connecting wire² inside a chip is measured in tenths of a micrometre and is still falling.

¹Central Processing Unit. These days, any piece of hardware (although in PCs it is usually a single chip) that controls a computer's major functions.²The smaller the wires, the closer you can pack the rest of the components.

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