Moore’s Law

The organizing premise of Chip War: Gordon Moore first graphed the exponential increase in transistor density in his famous 1965 article, and Carver Mead later coined the term “Moore’s Law” to describe it. The book frames the law not primarily as a story of physicists but of “manufacturing experts, supply chain specialists, and marketing managers” — Intel and Fairchild cofounders Moore and Bob Noyce “saw no limits to the growth of the chip industry so long as they could figure out mass production,” and Noyce’s price cuts (which Moore called as big an innovation as the integrated circuit itself) opened the civilian computer market that funded decades of progress. The drive to “make a financial killing,” the global supply chains American firms built to drive down costs, and consumer-market volume large enough to fund vast R&D were, in the book’s account, the forces that actually kept the law alive — even DARPA reasoned that helping companies “keep Moore’s Law alive” was crucial to America’s military edge.

Chip War also stresses the law’s fragility: Moore’s prediction is “only a prediction, not a fact of physics.” Industry figures from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang to John Hennessy have declared it dead, the rate of cost declines has slowed, and the EUV lithography machines needed to keep shrinking transistors now cost more than $100 million each. In The Man From The Future, the law appears as a prefiguration: John von Neumann observed in 1955 that computers’ overall capacity had “nearly doubled every year” since 1945, anticipating the trend Moore would name a decade later.

Context: Moore’s Law is the observation, articulated by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965 (revised in 1975), that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. For decades it was the defining cadence of the semiconductor industry and the broader digital revolution, though physical and economic limits have slowed it in recent years.

Where this appears

• Chip War — the book’s organizing scientific premise; traces how Moore, Noyce, Intel, manufacturing, and global supply chains kept the law alive, and why luminaries now call it dead.
• The Man From The Future — von Neumann’s 1955 observation that computer capacity nearly doubled every year prefigures Moore’s Law.