“The number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years” - Gordon Moore, 1965
Gordon E Moore was one of those few technocrats who shaped the modern world. His company, Intel Inc, which he set up with former colleague Robert Noyce in the year 1968, had played a major role in the growth of the semiconductor technology, the real heart of computing and ICT.
The prediction that he made in 1965, now called Moore’s Law, an observational hypothesis, is holding good even today (though they say now about it giving way to Neven’s law of quantum computing). Today a 15 core Intel Xeon Server chip holds about 4.3 billion transistors inside it and anyone could guess the processing power the computer that holds it.
Gordon Moore is an alumnus of San Jose University, University of California & Caltech where he completed his PhD. He then joined Nobel laureate William Shockley in Shockley Semiconductor division of Beckman Instruments to build semiconductors. Later, he became part of the ‘traitorous eight’, 8 senior engineers leaving Shockley Semiconductor to start Fairchild Semiconductor.
In the year 1968, along with one of the ‘traitorous eight’, Robert Noyce; Moore set up Intel Inc. While the company had its ups and downs, with the joining of Andre Grove & Craig Barrette, Intel never looked back and became the de-facto CPU of personal computers. By holding close to 90 % monopoly in CPU business of PCs, intel grew ever so fast in the past 5 decades, and is still at the centre of computing inspite of many pretenders, copycats and alternative technology co’s such as Google.
About Moore’s law he said, “Rather than becoming something that chronicled the progress of industry, it became something that drove it”. The law of the founder motivated the company to stay in course with initially the X86 series of microprocessors and then Pentium, Pentium Quadcore, Pentium i3 and now huge Xeon server processors!
Personally I had some experience with Intel Pentium processors as the product manager of HCL Hewlett Packard in the early 1990s. I remember our team being presented by the architect of the processor, Mr Vinod Dham at our labs at NOIDA. Also had the opportunity to work with the Intel India team in releasing our ‘Infiniti’ PCs based on Pentium processor for the India market. And I proudly wore the Intel Pentium T shirt that they gifted to me, with the successful bywords in it, “Intel Inside”!
About the growth of microprocessors Moore said this, “this powerful technology has allowed us to make more and more complex high performance circuits. They are the basis of everything electronics we have, unprecedented in human history”!
This self made billionaire (net worth of 7 billion USD as on Feb. 2023), passed away peacefully on March 24, 2023, at the age of 94 years, surrounded by family at his home in Hawaii.
The colossus of modern technology has called it a day. May his Soul rest in eternal peace!
Adios Gordon Moore
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