Moore's Law

In the Computer world, there is a term called Moore’s Law. It was pioneered by one of the founders of Intel, the leading semi-conductor corporation worldwide. Essentially this means that processor speeds will double every two years due to more transistors on silicon. Nvidia’s GTX 580, a graphics card released last week, has 3 billion transistors. The Pentium Processor, the original one, had 2 million transistors. This was released in 1995. That is 1500% increase in the number of transistors in a 15 year span. The chips have also been getting smaller down to 32 nm today. This is meant to reduce power consumption and increase efficiency. However, due to the limitations on small a chip can be, Moore’s Law may becoming to an end. Sandy Bridge, Intel’s new microarchitecture, will be released on the 32 nanometer technology and its successor will be manufactured on 22 nm technology. However, by 2020, the chips will get to a point where they are too small. 

Intel’s main competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, is attempting to attack the Netbook market that was powered by Intel’s Atom Processors, with an APU (Accelerated Processing Unit). This is the combination of a processor and a graphics processor, the brains and eyes of a computer. This revolutionary product is set to be more efficient, and strike Intel across the bow. AMD has been losing money had it not been for the Anti-Trust violations of Intel that were paid to AMD. Intel has a wide advantage at the moment, and Intel is expected to maintain its performance advantage with Sandy Bridge. It is expected to bring a 25% boosts while using 10% percent less power. But one question on the minds of many in the industry is will there be this exponential growth in performance in the Future? Time will tell. This greatly effects other industry and the American semiconductor industry. 
-S. Martin