Beyond Moore’s Law: The Future of Technology in Your Hands

While it's a complex miracle that the world is still turning amidst every challenge we've faced, technological advances have always emerged, often unthinkable before their discovery — except for Intel's co-founder, Gordon Moore.

Let us start by refreshing our memories regarding natural phenomena. The Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that a law is "a statement that describes how something works in the natural world"; therefore, Moore's Law is not really a law.

The importance of observation — of pattern-seeking as data is obtained left and right — became evident when, in 1965, Moore made the empirical prediction that the number of transistors would double each year for the next 10 years (later updating this to every 2 years). What does this mean?

A transistor is an important building block of electronic circuits, interpreting signals as 'on' or 'off' and amplifying weak electrical signals, similar to how a radio amplifier works.

The more intricate a device's design and capabilities, the greater the number of transistors — among other components — needed to develop such technological marvels.

Take a relatively recent announcement from Apple: the Apple Car could have included (because they gave up on the vehicle altogether, it seems) a chip with more than 500 billion transistors in it — one chip. This is astonishing, and people in the 60s who heard of Moore's work could have never imagined anything close to the reality we now inhabit.

Sure, replacing Germanium with Silicon— with a melting point difference of 476ºC between them —helped; but the implications extend beyond materials science. Entire armies of researchers, engineers, and leading manufacturing companies work shoulder to shoulder to stay ahead of Moore's clock, trying to run even faster than the two years he spoke of.

But how can we do this? Let this become a recurring topic in our blog: we need to stay informed — thoroughly and abundantly so. The fear of extraneous topics for you: our local logistics expert, packaging and transport supplier, project manager handling the finances of the marketing department, or director of dozens of technicians keeping your company's IT infrastructure afloat, must be crushed at once.

Know that tech companies are moving from "how many of these can we stack on top of each other without breaking them?" to "how can we take advantage of the apparent rotation of fundamental particles to skyrocket the efficiency of data processing in fractions of a second?" So you and your department — whatever its main function — are not only involved in this collective expedition but essential in making it possible.

For better or worse, we no longer need to pull one or two PhDs to understand whatever our news feed presents. Ask an AI (a reliable one, please, and don't forget to fact-check whatever it tells you); get closer to your old classmate who can translate all that jargon into a catch-up Friday drinks night. The point is: whatever you do, don't go astray, don't fear complexity — embrace it.