Gordon Moore and Moore's Law May Have Expired At the Same Time

I had a conversation with a computer engineering professor about a week ago. He said he was skeptical about production chips getting smaller than 3 nanometers. IBM came up with a 2 nanometer chip last year in research. 2 nanometers is about the width of a DNA strand.

Intel's original chips were 10,000 nanometers. As Intel and other companies continued to make them smaller and smaller, Gordon Moore noted what became known as Moore's law: the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every 2 years.

Gordon Moore died yesterday, 55 years after cofounding Intel in 1968. It would be a fascinating thing if Moore's law held for the length of his lifetime and then reached its limit. Moore's Law was arguably the most impactful force of the last 55 years. It would be an amazing thing if his law were to expire with him, as if he were a Silicon monarch rather than, say, Solon the lawgiver who left us with a law.

Moore's law? Oh, it no longer governs. Moore is dead now.