The Foundation of the New Economy: Computing Power Doubles Every Eighteen Months

• The foundation of the new economy is the revolutionary explosion of computer processing power.
• Back in 1965 Intel Corporation founder Gordon Moore projected that the density of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip would double every twelve months. (He was overoptimistic: now people say every eighteen months.)
• Information processing power grows along with transistor density--and the cost to make a chip of given size stays roughly constant.
• And Moore's Law still has at least another ten years--seven generations--to run.
• Our computers today have 66,000 times the processing power at the same cost as the computers of 1975. Our computers in 2010 will have ten million times the processing power of the computers of 1975.