Moore's Law
Created | Updated Jan 13, 2012
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.
