Moore's Law: Animated Infographic with 54 Years of Evolution

Moore's Law has a simple essence: the number of transistors in a processor doubles every 18 months. For much of the last 54 years, computing developments followed that pace. Today, we face a different future. Gordon Moore himself said in 2015 that his law had at most ten years left. Intel had to sweat blood to escape the 14-nanometer node, and the main advances now come through graphics cards. Would you like to know how Moore's Law advanced over more than half a century? This video will help.

The graphics chip on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has 18.6 billion transistors. The Intel 8088 processor from 1979 came with 29,000. Can you grow that much in 40 years? The answer is yes, and all arrows point to Moore's Law. Its original version spoke of doubling the number of transistors every 12 months, with a slowdown to 18-24 months starting in the 1980s. The industry adopted that law as a kind of standard over the past decades, but everything is different now. TSMC and Samsung are the only names that managed more or less to keep up with Moore's Law, and the distortion will continue with each additional step toward the fundamental limits of silicon.

The Evolution of Moore's Law

The DataGrapha channel published an animated infographic on YouTube covering Moore's Law from its birth in 1965 to today. A detail that often goes unnoticed is that Moore's Law itself precedes processors: The Intel 4004 came to market in 1971 with 2,250 transistors. In just ten years, the chip with the most transistors was the Motorola 68000, used in arcade machines, home consoles, and Apple systems. In 1991, the prediction of Moore's Law was about two million transistors, but the Intel 80486 had only half. Not even the generational leap of the Pentium processors was enough to match its speed. This imbalance continued until 2001-2002, when the Radeon R300 (9700 Pro) graphics chip and the Itanium processors appeared.

Starting this decade, Moore's Law had to throw in the towel (at least for a while) against the extraordinary advance of graphics architectures, both Nvidia and AMD. Nvidia's Kepler chips have more than 7 billion transistors, while Moore's Law floated at half that value. Today, Moore's Law has escaped again, and everything seems to indicate that it will be unattainable. In 2020 we will need a processor with more than 55 billion transistors just to tie, equivalent to three RTX 2080 Ti combined.