Architects· 64-bit
Transistor counts doubled every two years for half a century. Clock speeds stopped rising in 2005. Here is why.
In 1965 Gordon Moore, a chemist who would co-found Intel, plotted five data points and noticed that the number of components on a chip was doubling at a steady rate. He predicted it would continue. In 1975 he settled on doubling about every two years. This is Moore's law: not a law of nature, but a target an entire industry organised itself to hit.