Moore’s Law and My iPad

Are you familiar with Moore’s Law? It was named after Gordon Moore, a co-founder, engineer, and chairman at Intel Corporation. This ‘law’ originated sometime around 1970 and went like this: processor speed, or overall processor power would double every two years. Stated another way:

”To break down the law even further, it specifically stated that the number of transistors on an affordable CPU would double every two years (which is essentially the same thing that was stated before) but ‘more transistors’ is more accurate.” (Mooreslaw.org).

Advances in technology have resulting in the silicon chip densities increasing, and speeds increasing at amazing rates. The increased in processor speeds, and the technology is has launched around us has changed the world.

It has also change how we think about computing devices. I remember my first computer that incorporated a spinning hard drive. It was a whopping 20Mb drive. I had 512MB of memory in that one. Some of my earlier computers had even less memory, and no hard drive. At work, I was using a 8” floopy and had no hard drive. I also used tape drives on a TRS—80. Times have changed, thankfully.

Processors speeds are not advancing as fast these days, but memory continues to increase in density and speed. Samsung is about the begin producing of a 12Gb DRAM chip. The target market is smartphones. Check this out:

Samsung begins mass production of 12GB LPDDR4X DRAM chips for smartphones

My iPad had 512Gb of flash memory. I could have opted for the 1Tb version. It is faster than any computer I have ever used, and meets all my computing needs. Think about that.

~ Rick

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