THERE IS AN old joke in the semiconductor business that the number of people predicting the death of Moore's law doubles every two years. This refers to another prediction, made in the 1970s by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, a giant chipmaker, that the number of transistors which can be crammed onto a silicon chip doubles every two years. When that number exceeded 1m in the mid-1980s, some said the rate of progress had to slow down. By 2005 the number of transistors on a chip rose above 1bn, which many thought was unsustainable. But there are now around 5obn transistors jostling for space on some chips and producers are gunning for more.
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