Intel Blogger Urges Tech Industry Consciousness on 50th Birthday of Moore's Law

On April 19, 1965, three years before co-founding Intel, Gordon Moore put forward what became Moore’s Law, predicting that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double roughly every 24 months. In recognition of the 50-year anniversary of Moore’s Law, Intel Product Evangelist Ryan Tabrah said in a blog post that Moore’s projection became a layman’s explanation of the "exponential" introduction of new devices and technology over the past 50 years. Putting Moore’s comment into historical perspective, Tabrah noted that at the time the computer mouse was still a prototype; DRAM hadn’t yet been invented; development of Arpanet, forerunner to the Internet, hadn’t begun and no one had received a Ph.D. in computer science. Moore said the theory wasn’t about technical hurdles but about the associated economics, and Tabrah reminded engineers and developers that economics should inform the way the industry views the IoT market and “the eventuality of technology.” Competition, advancements in technology, and scale will automatically provide more affordable and smaller computing devices, he said. Those devices will continue to become less about “nice to have” and “more of a vehicle, forcefully driving human advancement and raising the standard of living for everyone on earth,” Tabrah said. Recalling the anniversary of Moore’s Law, Tabrah urged tech society “to think about how we use these economies of scale.” With the much-anticipated Apple Watch on pre-sale, Tabrah referred to “everyday technology enthusiasts struggling to get the latest digital watch that costs more than most people in the world make in a week.” He urged enthusiasts to “take some time to pause and think about the rest of the world: how are most going to get clean water tomorrow, or survive tomorrow’s traffic as millions of people stress overloaded transportation infrastructures.” He said we should all try together to “create and extend computing technology to connect and enrich the lives of every person on earth,” which he called the “truly amazing legacy of Moore’s law.”