moore's+law

=Moore's Law=

toc Read here about the growth patterns of computational capability. The pattern of CPU growth is known as Moore's law. These growth patterns are good examples of exponential growth and how such growth leads to scale variance.

=Overview=

The exponential growth of computing is a marvelous quantitative example of the exponentially growing returns from an evolutionary process. We can express the exponential growth of computing in terms of its accelerating pace: it took ninety years to achieve the first MIPS per thousand dollars; now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every five hours. Despite this massive deflation in the cost of information technologies, demand has more than kept up. The number of bits shipped has doubled every 1.1 years, faster than the halving time in cost per bit, which is 1.5 years. As a result, the semiconductor industry enjoyed 18 percent annual growth in total revenue from 1958 to 2002. The entire information-technology (IT) industry has grown from 4.2 percent of the gross domestic product in 1977 to 8.2 percent in 1998. IT has become increasingly influential in all economic sectors. The share of value contributed by information technology for most categories of products and services is rapidly increasing. Even common manufactured products such as tables and chairs have an information content, represented by their computerized designs and the programming of the inventory-procurement systems and automated-fabrication systems used in their assembly. Kurzweil cites many trends associated with Moore’s law growth include Microprocessor clock speed, microprocessor cost per transistor cycle, transistors per microprocessor, processor performance, DNA sequencing cost (dollars per finished base pair), Amount of base pairs and sequences in GenBank, RAM bits per dollar (from vacuum tube, to discrete transistor and on to ICC), magnetic data storage in bits per dollar; Computer memory: DRAM half pitch feature size. Dynamic RAM price, average transistor price, transistor manufacturing costs (microcents per wafer), total (information technology) bits shipped; E-commerce revenues in the USA in billions of dollars, 1997—2005; and IT’s share of the economy as percent of GDP, 1975 to 2000.

See also network effects.

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