Jensen Huang says Moore’s law is dead. Not quite yet

TWO YEARS shy of its 60th birthday, Moore’s law has become a bit like Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat—at once dead and alive. In 1965 Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel, observed that the number of transistors—a type of electronic component—that could be crammed onto a microchip was doubling every 12 months, a figure he later revised to every two years.

That observation became an aspiration that set the pace for the entire computing industry. Chips produced in 1971 could fit 200 transistors into one square millimetre. Today’s most advanced chips cram 130m into the same space, and each operates tens of thousands of times more quickly to boot. If cars had improved at the same rate, modern ones would have top speeds in the tens of millions of miles per hour.