The enduring legacy of Gordon Moore

Gordon Moore, the elder statesman of the technology industry, passed away today at the age of 94.

He was one of the nation’s greatest citizens as a pioneer of the semiconductor industry and chairman emeritus of Intel, which he cofounded in 1968. He was known for formulating Moore’s Law in 1965. He predicted that the number of components on a chip would double every couple of years or so.

That prediction has held up remarkably well for about 58 years. In 1965, chip makers could fit about 64 transistors on a chip. By 1971, Intel could fit 2,300 transistors on its first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. Nvidia can now put 80 billion transistors on a graphics processing unit (GPU), and Cerebras can put 2.6 trillion transistors on a pizza-size silicon wafer. That is the power of exponential growth.

I had the pleasure of meeting Moore in earlier days, when he regularly came out to be a beacon for younger leaders of Silicon Valley, which was a bunch of orchards when he arrived in the Bay Area. Like Intel cofounders Robert Noyce and Andy Grove, Moore became one of Silicon Valley’s greatest thought leaders.

He noted at one point that the number of transistors built by the chip industry had just about surpassed the number of ants in the world. Such calculations were an inspiration for engineers around the world. And they communicated the scale of the electronics revolution.

He was also nice. I last saw him in person in 2015 at an event that celebrated the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law. He appeared on stage with New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman. They talked about how semiconductors, which Moore pioneered at Shockley Laboratories, Fairchild Semiconductor, and finally Intel. At that event, Moore ambled up on stage a little slowly, but he was still as sharp as you’d expect the cofounder of Intel to be. He had a melodic voice and a folksy style.

Speaking at the Exploratorium, a monument to science, Moore said, “I was beginning to see in our laboratory that we would get more electronics on a chip, and this was an opportunity to get that message across. I had no idea it would be so precise as a prediction.”