What is Moore's Law?

John Spacey, updated on December 02, 2020

Moore's Law is the prediction that the speed of computer processors doubles every 18 months.

It is based on a 1965 prediction by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors in a processor doubles every year. The prediction was revised to doubling every two years in 1975 and remained remarkably accurate for several decades.

The more commonly quoted definition of Morre's Law is that processor speed doubles every 18 months. This version accounts for the improvement in the speed of transistors together with the doubling of their numbers.

The improvements in processor speeds and associated declines in cost for processing sparked an information technology revolution that transformed the world beginning in the 1960s. Information technology continues to transform governments, industry, society and culture and is likely to be amongst the defining characteristics of our age.

Space Shuttle Example

The Space Shuttle program is often used as an example of Moore's Law. The first Space Shuttle launched in 1981 featured computers capable of 480,000 instructions per second. Common smart phones are now capable of billions of instructions per second. The Space Shuttle Atlantis, the last shuttle to launch in 2011 only had a small percentage of the computing power of a laptop at the time. The computers weren't upgraded to current standards because they were valued for their reliability.

Limits to Moore's Law

It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.
~ Gordon Moore

Some observers claim that Moore's Law has begun to break down due to the high cost of R&D, manufacturing and test costs. This is not viewed as a technical limitation, although it is anticipated that miniaturization of current technologies may reach limits around 2030 as transistors approach atomic size.

Selected Examples

The following are a few examples of processor capacity that demonstrate Moore's law. Keep in mind that this list includes both supercomputers and processors for relatively inexpensive consumer devices.

System	Year	Million Operations Per Second
IBM 7030 (supercomputer)	1961	1.2
Intel 4004	1971	0.09
Cray 1 (supercomputer)	1975	160
Intel 8080	1974	0.145
IBM System 370 (mainframe)	1977	0.730
Intel 8035	1980	6
Intel 286	1982	1.28
ARM2	1986	4
Motorola 68030	1987	9
Namco System 21 (arcade system)	1988	73
Intel i486DX	1989	8.7
ARM7	1994	40
Intel Pentium	1994	188
Intel Pentium Pro	1996	541
Intel Pentium III	1999	2,054
ARM Cortex-M3	2004	125
Intel Core 2 Extreme	2006	49,161
Intel Core i7 920	2008	82,300
Intel Core i7 2600K	2011	176,170
Intel Core i7 5960X	2014	298,190
AMD Ryzen Threadripper	2020	2,356,230
Apple A12	2019	5,000,000
Apple A14	2020	11,000,000
Fugaku (supercomputer)	2021	442,000,000,000

Overview: Moores Law
Type	Information Technology
Definition (1)	The prediction that the speed of computer processors doubles every 18 months.
Definition (2)	The prediction that the number of transistors on commercially available processors doubles every 2 years.
Related Concepts	Moore's Law vs Rock's Law Forces That Shape Technology