and that includes Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb that the number of microchips on a transister would double roughly every 24 months. Moore’s Law is nearing its end of life:
Nature recently published an article on the forthcoming end of Moore’s Law. In case you don’t keep up with tech buzz, this refers to Intel founder Gordon Moore’s empirical observation that the number of transistors in a microchip doubled every 24 months, running from roughly 1965 to the present. To the layman, this meant that computers roughly doubled in power every two years and became 1000 times more powerful every two decades.
Moore’s Law is more than just geek arcana. It’s a philosophical statement about the progress of technology. We live in times with such rapid growth in scientific knowledge, manufacturing capability, and global economic power that we have come to expect technology to improve so fast we can’t even keep up. We’re used to our computers and phones and entertainment systems and internet resources upgrading at a blinding tempo. So much so that we take it for granted.
Well, things are about to change.
One of the implications is that poorly-designed software that banks on faster, better hardware coming along just in time to remedy its deficiencies and companies that have grown into behemoths by developing such software can no longer make that assumption. That poorly-designed operating system, platform, or application may run no better in five years than it does now.
You can put what I know about IT in a thimble, but that strikes me as a development on the order of electrification.