What is moores law yahoo

Eventually, Moore's insight became a prediction, which in turn became the golden rule known as Moore's Law. Moore's Law has been a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth that are hallmarks of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moore's Law implies that computers, machines that run on computers, and computing power all become smaller, faster, and cheaper with time, as transistors on integrated circuits become more efficient.

More than 50 years later, we feel the lasting impact and benefits of Moore's Law in many ways. As transistors in integrated circuits become more efficient, computers become smaller and faster. Chips and transistors are microscopic structures that contain carbon and silicon molecules, which are aligned perfectly to move electricity along the circuit faster. The faster a microchip processes electrical signals, the more efficient a computer becomes.

The cost of higher-powered computers has been dropping annually, partly because of lower labor costs and reduced semiconductor prices. Practically every facet of a high-tech society benefits from Moore's Law in action. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and computer tablets would not work without tiny processors; neither would video games, spreadsheets, accurate weather forecasts, and global positioning systems GPS.

Moreover, smaller and faster computers improve transportation, health care, education, and energy production—to name but a few of the industries that have progressed because of the increased power of computer chips. Experts agree that computers should reach the physical limits of Moore's Law at some point in the s.

The high temperatures of transistors eventually would make it impossible to create smaller circuits. This is because cooling down the transistors takes more energy than the amount of energy that already passes through the transistors.

In a interview, Moore himself admitted that " We're pushing up against some fairly fundamental limits so one of these days we're going to have to stop making things smaller. The fact that Moore's Law may be approaching its natural death is perhaps most painfully present at the chip manufacturers themselves; as these companies are saddled with the task of building ever-more-powerful chips against the reality of physical odds.

Even Intel is competing with itself and its industry to create what ultimately may not be possible. In , with its nanometer nm processor, Intel was able to boast of having the world's smallest and most advanced transistors in a mass-produced product. In , Intel launched an even smaller, more powerful 14nm chip; and today, the company is struggling to bring its 10nm chip to market. For perspective, one nanometer is one billionth of a meter, smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The diameter of an atom ranges from about 0.

The vision of an endlessly empowered and interconnected future brings both challenges and benefits. Shrinking transistors have powered advances in computing for more than half a century, but soon engineers and scientists must find other ways to make computers more capable. Instead of physical processes, applications and software may help improve the speed and efficiency of computers. Cloud computing, wireless communication, the Internet of Things IoT , and quantum physics all may play a role in the future of computer tech innovation.

Despite the growing concerns around privacy and security, the advantages of ever-smarter computing technology can help keep us healthier, safer, and more productive in the long run.

In , George Moore posited that roughly every two years, the number of transistors on microchips will double. What this means specifically, is that transistors in integrated circuits have become faster.

Transistors conduct electricity, which contain carbon and silicon molecules that can make the electricity run faster across the circuit.

The faster the integrated circuit conducts electricity, the faster the computer operates. What this means is that computers are projected to reach their limits because transistors will be unable to operate within smaller circuits at increasingly higher temperatures. This is due to the fact that cooling the transistors will require more energy than the energy that passes through the transistor itself.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. Accessed August 20, MIT Technology Review. IEEE Spectrum. Moore, National Nanotechnology Initiative. Company Profiles. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Investopedia. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data.

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IBM has developed stacked chips for mobile phones, claiming the technique improves power efficiency by up to 40 percent. Every once in a while a material breakthrough comes along that improves chip performance. Now scientists are concentrating on improving the very semiconductor material that chips are made of. While the silicon used in chips is wonderfully abundant it has pretty much the same chemistry found in sand , researchers are investigating other materials that might allow for chips with even tighter component densities.

Researchers have demonstrated that chips made with supergeeky-sounding semiconductor materials such as indium gallium arsenide, indium aluminum arsenide, germanium, and bismuth telluride can run faster and require less wattage than their silicon counterparts. Chen, J. Analytis, J. Chu, Z. Liu, S. Mo, X. Qi, H. Zhang, et al. Perhaps even more exotic and downright bizarre , researchers at the University of Delaware have experimented with a faster-than-silicon material derived from chicken feathers!

Hyperefficient chips of the future may also be made out of carbon nanotubes, once the technology to assemble the tiny structures becomes commercially viable.

Other designs move away from electricity over silicon. Optical computing, where signals are sent via light rather than electricity, promises to be faster than conventional chips, if lasers can be mass produced in miniature silicon laser experiments show promise. Others are experimenting by crafting computing components using biological material think a DNA-based storage device. Conventional computing stores data as a combination of bits, where a bit is either a one or a zero. Quantum computers, leveraging principles of quantum physics, employ qubits that can be both one and zero at the same time.

Add a bit to a quantum computer and its capacity increases exponentially. For comparison, consider that a computer model of serotonin, a molecule vital to regulating the human central nervous system, would require 10 94 bytes of information. But modeling a serotonin molecule using quantum computing would take just qubits. Quantum computing might also accurately predict the weather months in advance or offer unbreakable computer security.

Ever have trouble placing a name with a face? Opportunities abound. At a at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, D-Wave demonstrated Orion, a sixteen-qubit computer that could find a protein in a database, figure out the optimal wedding guest seating arrangements, and solve a Sudoku puzzle.

Scientific opinion varied widely as to the significance of the D-Wave advance. The Orion was built using a chip cooled to minus degrees Celsius in a bath of liquid helium and tasks were performed at speeds about times slower than conventional PCs.

Not exactly commercial stuff. But it was the most advanced quantum computing demonstration to date. Supercomputers Computers that are among the fastest of any in the world at the time of their introduction. Supercomputing was once the domain of governments and high-end research labs, performing tasks such as simulating the explosion of nuclear devices, or analyzing large-scale weather and climate phenomena. But it turns out with a bit of tweaking, the algorithms used in this work are profoundly useful to business.

One of the first customers of Deep Blue technologies was United Airlines, which gained an ability to examine three hundred and fifty thousand flight path combinations for its scheduling systems—a figure well ahead of the previous limit of three thousand. Estimated savings through better yield management? Over fifty million dollars! Finance found uses, too. An early adopter of the technology, at the time of deployment, CIBC was the only bank that international regulators allowed to calculate its own capital needs rather than use boilerplate ratios.

Also noteworthy: the supercomputer-enabled, risk-savvy CIBC was relatively unscathed by the sub-prime crisis. Modern supercomputing is typically done via a technique called massively parallel Computers designed with many microprocessors that work together, simultaneously, to solve problems.

The fastest of these supercomputers are built using hundreds of microprocessors, all programmed to work in unison as one big brain. The Air Force recently issued a request-for-proposal to purchase 2, PlayStation 3 systems in hopes of crafting a supercheap, superpowerful machine using off-the-shelf parts. Another technology, known as grid computing A type of computing that uses special software to enable several computers to work together on a common problem as if they were a massively parallel supercomputer.

With grid computing, firms place special software on its existing PCs or servers that enables these computers to work together on a common problem. With grid software installed on them, these idle devices can be marshaled to attack portions of a complex task as if they collectively were one massively parallel supercomputer. This technique radically changes the economics of high-performance computing.

BusinessWeek reports that while a middle-of-the-road supercomputer could run as much as thirty million dollars, grid computing software and services to perform comparable tasks can cost as little as twenty-five thousand dollars, assuming an organization already has PCs and servers in place. An early pioneer in grid computing is the biotech firm Monsanto.

Monsanto enlists computers to explore ways to manipulate genes to create crop strains that are resistant to cold, drought, bugs, pesticides, or that are more nutritious. Previously with even the largest computer Monsanto had in-house, gene analysis was taking six weeks and the firm was able to analyze only ten to fifty genes a year. But by leveraging grid computing, Monsanto has reduced gene analysis to less than a day. The fiftyfold time savings now lets the firm consider thousands of genetic combinations in a year.

Grids are now everywhere. Movie studios use them to create special effects and animated films. GM and Ford use grids to simulate crash tests, saving millions in junked cars and speeding time to market. Pratt and Whitney test aircraft engine designs on a grid. And biotech firms including Aventis, GlaxoSmithKlein, and Pfizer push their research through a quicker pipeline by harnessing grid power.

By the second year of operation, the JPMorgan Chase grid was saving the firm five million dollars per year. Massive clusters of computers running software that allows them to operate as a unified service also enable new service-based computing models, such as software as a service SaaS A form of cloud computing where a firm subscribes to a third-party software and receives a service that is delivered online. In these models, organizations replace traditional software and hardware that they would run in-house with services that are delivered online.

Google, Microsoft, SalesForce. Server farms provide the infrastructure backbone to SaaS and hardware cloud efforts, as well as many large-scale Internet services. You can join a grid, too. A version of Folding Home software for the PlayStation 3 had enlisted over half a million consoles within months of release.

Having access to these free resources is an enormous advantage for researchers. Multicore, massively parallel, and grid computing are all related in that each attempts to lash together multiple computing devices so that they can work together to solve problems. Think of multicore chips as having several processors in a single chip. Think of massively parallel supercomputers as having several chips in one computer, and think of grid computing as using existing computers to work together on a single task essentially a computer made up of multiple computers.

Costs fall, workers become more productive, innovations flourish, and we gorge at a buffet of digital entertainment that includes music, movies, and games.

But there is a dark side to this faster and cheaper advancement. A PC has an expected lifetime of three to five years.

A cell phone? Two years or less. Rapid obsolescence means the creation of ever-growing mountains of discarded tech junk, known as electronic waste or e-waste Discarded, often obsolete technology; also known as electronic waste. According to the U. Consumer electronics and computing equipment can be a toxic cocktail that includes cadmium, mercury, lead, and other hazardous materials.

The quick answer would be to recycle this stuff. The complexities of the modern value chain, the vagaries of international law, and the nefarious actions of those willing to put profits above principle show how difficult addressing this problem will be. The process of separating out the densely packed materials inside tech products so that the value in e-waste can be effectively harvested is extremely labor intensive, more akin to reverse manufacturing than any sort of curbside recycling efforts.

Much of this waste ends up in China, South Asia, or sub-Saharan Africa, where it is processed in dreadful conditions. Workers in and around Guiyu toil without protective equipment, breathing clouds of toxins generated as they burn the plastic skins off of wires to get at the copper inside. Others use buckets, pots, or wok-like pans in many cases the same implements used for cooking to sluice components in acid baths to release precious metals—recovery processes that create even more toxins.

Water samples taken in the region showed lead and heavy metal contamination levels some four hundred to six hundred times greater than what international standards deem safe. The area is so polluted that drinking water must be trucked in from eighteen miles away.

Pregnancies are six times more likely to end in miscarriage, and 70 percent of the kids in the region have too much lead in their blood. China cares about its environment.

The nation has banned the importing of e-waste since But corruption ensures that e-waste continues to flow into the country. Well-meaning U. The trade is often brokered by middlemen who mask the eventual destination and fate of the products purchased. Even among those products that gain a second or third life in developing nations, the inevitable is simply postponed, with e-waste almost certain to end up in landfills that lack the protective groundwater barriers and environmental engineering of their industrialized counterparts.

The reality is e-waste management is extraordinarily difficult to monitor and track, and loopholes are rampant. A slip up intentional or not can, in seconds, be captured by someone with a cell phone, uploaded to YouTube, or offered in a blog posting for the world to see. The worst cases expose firms to legal action and can tarnish a brand for years.

Big firms are big targets, and environmentalists have been quick to push the best-known tech firms and retailers to take back their products for responsible recycling and to eliminate the worst toxins from their offerings. Critics have shot back that signaling out Apple is unfair. The firm was one of the first computer companies to eliminate lead-lined glass monitors from its product line, and has been a pioneer of reduced-sized packaging that leverage recyclable materials.

But if the firm that counts Al Gore among its advisors can get tripped up on green issues, all firms are vulnerable. Environmentalists see this pressure to deal with e-waste as yielding results: Apple and most other tech firms have continually moved to eliminate major toxins from their manufacturing processes. How were products manufactured? Using which materials? Under what conditions? Who provides collection and disposal? A recent government sting from the U.

Government Accountability Office U. GAO found that forty-three American recyclers were willing to sell e-waste illegally to foreign countries, without gaining EPA or foreign country approval. Appallingly, at least three of them held Earth Day electronics-recycling events. So how can firms and individuals choose proper disposal partners? The Basel Action Network e-Stewards program certifies firms via a third-party audit, with compliant participants committing to eliminating e-waste export, land dumping, incineration, and toxic recycling via prison labor.

Standards, techniques, and auditing practices are constantly in flux, so consult these organizations for the latest partner lists, guidelines, and audit practices. Which brings us back to Gordon Moore. The generosity of the Gordon and Betty Moore foundation includes, among other major contributions, the largest single gift to a private conservation organization. Indeed, Silicon Valley, while being the birthplace of products that become e-waste, also promises to be at the forefront of finding solutions to modern environmental challenges.

Previous Chapter. Table of Contents. Next Chapter. Understand how the price elasticity associated with faster and cheaper technologies opens new markets, creates new opportunities for firms and society, and can catalyze industry disruption.

Recognize and define various terms for measuring data capacity. Consider the managerial implication of faster and cheaper computing on areas such as strategic planning, inventory, and accounting. Ambient Devices and the Fifth Wave Carl Yankowski almost never gets caught in the rain without his umbrella. Source: Used with permission from Ambient Devices. Table 4. Music Retailers 1. Musicland 1. Wal-Mart 1. The Handleman 2. Best Buy 2. Wal-Mart 3. Tower Records 3.

Target 3. Best Buy 4. Trans World Music 7. The firms that dominated music sales when you were born are now bankrupt, while one that had never sold a track now sells more than anyone else. Note: Twelve tracks are equivalent to one CD. Bits and Bytes Computers express data as bits that are either one or zero.

Nonchip-based technology also advances rapidly. Disk drive storage doubles roughly every twelve months, while equipment to speed transmissions over fiber-optic lines has doubled every nine months. These trends influence inventory value, depreciation accounting, employee training, and other managerial functions.

They also help improve productivity and keep interest rates low. From a strategic perspective, these trends suggest that what is impossible from a cost or performance perspective today may be possible in the future.

This fact provides an opportunity to those who recognize and can capitalize on the capabilities of new technology. As technology advances, new industries, business models, and products are created, while established firms and ways of doing business can be destroyed. Managers must regularly study trends and trajectory in technology to recognize opportunity and avoid disruption.

What does it apply to? Are other aspects of computing advancing as well? At what rates? What is a microprocessor? What is a semiconductor? What is the substance from which most semiconductors are made? How do does flash memory differ from the memory in a PC?

Are both solid state? How does it influence managerial thinking? What is price elasticity? Give examples of firms that have effectively leveraged the advancement of processing, storage, and networking technology.

What are the five waves of computing? Give examples of firms and industries impacted by the fifth wave. Give examples of how tech has benefited those who likely would not have been able to afford the technology of a prior generation. How have cheaper, faster chips impacted the camera industry?

Give an example of the leadership shifts that have occurred in this industry. How did Amazon utilize the steep decline in magnetic storage costs to its advantage?

Discuss the limitations of each of these approaches. Buying Time One way to overcome this problem is with multicore microprocessors Microprocessors with two or more typically lower power calculating processor cores on the same piece of silicon , made by putting two or more lower power processor cores think of a core as the calculating part of a microprocessor on a single chip.