Moore's First Law and Its Impact

Moore's Law is the prediction made by one of Intel's founders, Gordon Moore, that the number of transistors that engineers could place onto a microchip would double every 18 months. This in turn meant that CPU power would increase accordingly every year and a half. The graphic representation of this can be seen in Figure 2-1 below. This was a benefit to the computer scientist and other power hungry commercial users who always needed faster equipment. Also, this became a shorthand way for computer systems vendors to predict that they would be able to double performance every 18 months.

To date, Moore's first law has remained unchanged, as technological advances have continued to confound those who predicted the demise of its overly optimistic assumptions. Where the limitation was going to be the optics to align the silicon wafers, a solution was found to work around it. Another time, the light waves themselves used were supposed to be too coarse to make even smaller electronic lines—but clever engineers solved this issue by switching to UV light, which has an even shorter wavelength than the visible light spectrum normally used.

This in turn set up a separate phenomenon in the computer software industry that paralleled the continued rise in processing power. As processors can handle more and more data and task instructions, applications have quickly moved to seize upon the greater amount of power on any given computer.

This has had a real impact on enterprise applications. Many applications today such as Oracle Financial products or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions from SAP simply cannot run efficiently except on the latest machines. When users want to run the latest application's bells and whistles but find that their performance is restricted, they will naturally turn to a faster machine.