Moore's law

This is not really a law but more of an observation that has held true for decades.

The 'law' highlights the sheer pace of development in computers over the last 40 years.

Moore's Law states that the number of transistors making up a microprocessor will double every two years - which means that processing power will also increase at roughly the same rate.

It was coined by one of the founders of the Intel, a company that has been producing microprocessors since the beginning.

Amazingly this 'law' has been true since the 1970's when the first microprocessors only had a few thousand transistors. Today the multi-core processors have more than a billion transistors.

To give you some idea of what this means - a quad-core Intel processor sitting in a standard PC of today can compute at 37 GigaFlops ( a measure of maths calculations per second) and costs about £500. Only twelve years ago (1997) that computing power would have cost £500,000 as that was the performance of a supercomputer of the time - so whilst you are watching the latest iPlayer movie in a corner of your screen and doing your other work - think of the computing power that is now so normal for us.

2020-10