MEXICO CITY (FORTUNE) – Moore’s Law, which has enabled the birth of personal computers, telephones, clocks, thermostats or even smart pans, meets this Sunday 50 year period.
Created by the founder of the firm of microprocessors Intel, Gordon Moore, law, better defined as observation, was posted on April 19, 1965 in the Journal of Electronic Electronics Magazine.
Moore said at the time that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months average, expanding its processing capacity without modifying its cost and space.
Moore’s theory has kept pace so far, allowing companies like Intel, Samsung, AMD, Qualcomm and other developers create ever smaller transistors.
The proliferation of electronic components, today invisible to the human eye, have enabled the development of all computer systems in society and the development of new technology-driven products.
“It’s a common mistake to think of Moore’s Law as an exclusive application of computer market. Silicon processors are applied to a wide variety of products: smartphones, watches, sunglasses, jewelry, clothing, appliances, video games, cars and security systems, “said Intel President for Latin America, Steve Long, in a statement.
These examples demonstrate how would the world be if Moore’s Law had not been maintained for five decades.
1. Gadgets Pocket? Impossible
If a current Android phone was manufactured with an 1971 microprocessor, the chip would have to be the size of a parking spot, according Intel estimates.
In 1974, the first mobile phone, Dynatec, was 25 cm long and 7 cm wide, weighed 794 grams and was sold for about $ 4,000. Was exclusively for the phone.
Currently, the iPhone 6 Plus, one of the smart phone market and expensive, weighs 172 grams, a width of 7.1 mm, sold around 15,000 pesos.
So, smartphones, but even more wearable pieces or as lenses or bracelets would be physically impossible to create.
2. Ant Power
One of the first Intel processors, the 4004, 1971, had 4 kilobytes (KB) of memory, 2,300 transistors and operating at a clock frequency (CPU) 740 Khz. Compared current Intel Core i5 processors are 3,500 times faster, 90,000 times more efficient in their energy consumption, with 1,300 million transistors and operating with 2.0 CPU 3.8 Ghz.
3. Neither PC or Mac
Without Moore’s Law, personal computer or smart phone would never have come true.
The Cray-1, one of the first supercomputers in the world, had in 1976 an average cost of between five and eight million, weighed 5.5 tons and occupied the entire space of a room.
The computational power of the Cray-1 was 160 million floating point operations per second (flops, for its acronym in English) and had 8 MB of memory.
In contrast, “the most basic of personal computers today can make 10 times more operations flops in a second and have 100 times more memory, while costing a fraction of the Cray-1.
4. Economy of scale
The first transistors were the size of the rubber tip of a pencil. However, today companies like Intel, Qualcomm, AMD and others develop their processors nanoscale, ie a billionth of a meter.
How small is small? According to the National Nanotechnology Initiative United States, a nanometer is what grows the nail of a human being in a second. A human hair, for example, has a width of from 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers.
Modern transistors are as small as 70 nanometers. According to Intel about six million tri-gate type transistors could fit on the endpoint that can be read at the end of this sentence.
“For a single transistor, this would have to expand a single chip the size of a royal house a home,” Intel said.
5. If Moore apply for all
Intel imagined what would happen if Moore’s theory applied to other industries. In this scenario, a trip to the moon could be done in a minute, instead of three days and a flight between New York and New Zealand could be completed in the time it takes to fasten your seatbelt.
If the file size redujaran as did the transistors would ant size vehicles. In the construction sector, if prices of skyscrapers decrease its price at the rate of Moore’s Law, a person could buy one for less than you invest in a PC.
“If housing prices decline by the same proportion as transistors, a person could buy a house at the price of a candy” imagined Intel.
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