AND died 94-year-old Gordon Moore, co-founder of the microprocessor company Intel, best known for having developed “Moore’s law”, according to which the computing power of processors doubles every two years for the same size. A “law” drawn up in the 1960s which remained valid for decades, and which has only ceased to occur a few years ago, but which nonetheless remains the best-known rule of information technology, often known even by those unfamiliar with computers and processors .
Gordon Earl Moore was born in 1929 in San Francisco, the son of a policeman and a merchant. He studied chemistry at Berkley and then at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology: two of the best US universities. He said that he wanted to be a teacher but couldn’t, and so it became his tell a accidental entrepreneuran “entrepreneur by chance”.
In the 1950s Moore became increasingly interested in semiconductors, which are still fundamental components for the microprocessors underlying electronics, and integrated circuits. In 1968 he co-founded Intel, originally called Integrated Electronics Corporation, with Robert Noyce, who is believed to have invented microchips. In addition to technological innovations, Intel anticipated working approaches that would later become common to many other companies in Silicon Valley. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, he wrote on Twitter that Moore was “a giant, one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley and a true visionary who paved the way for the technological revolution”.
Moore was CEO of Intel from 1975 to 1987 and then president until 1997. In the following years he devoted himself mainly to philanthropic activities through the foundation created together with his wife.
He elaborated the law that bears his name in 1965 and in 1975 he updated it (at the beginning he had spoken of “every year”, then of “every two years”), adding two corollaries relating to the cost of production and the selling price of computer. The law, which began to be called “Moore’s” only later, and not by choice of its creator, says in short that the computing power of processors doubles every two years for the same size.
In the following years, the semiconductor industry adopted Moore’s law, believing that two years was a suitable deadline to develop systems, technologies and strategies to double the power of microprocessors. For decades, the pace of processor production has been kept up with almost astonishing accuracy given the complexity of designing and manufacturing increasingly smaller and more powerful microprocessors.
However, things changed in 2016, the year in which Moore’s law began to be considered no longer valid, because the pace of miniaturization had slowed down.
Moore was always modest in speaking of his law: “It was a precision that turned out to be incredibly precise,” he said in 2000, “much more precise than I ever could have imagined.” And already in 2005 he predicted that it would be “over” within a few years.
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