Index & Notes

Moore's Law for Intel Processors

We've all heard of "Moore's Law"; not a real law, but an observation by Gordon Moore of Intel that the number of chip transistors per dollar was doubling every year. Here it's shown for Intel's own processors, from the 4004 that went into the first calculators, past the 8086 that made the IBM PC run, through the 80386 that they called a "mainframe on a chip", and now to the latest generation that touches on a billion transistors per chip. The circuit elements are now 45nm across, meaning you could fit 300 of them onto the top of a human blood cell.

© Roy Brander, P.Eng 2008