10 Part II Information Technology Infrastructure

FIGURE 5.4 Moore’s law and microprocessor performance.

Packing over 2 billion transistors

into a tiny microprocessor has Moore’s Law Means
1970 More Performance
exponentially increased processing 1974
power. Processing power has
increased to more than 128 000 1978
MIPS (2.6 billion instructions per 1982
second). 1986
Source: Authors’ estimate. 1990
1994
1998
2002
2006
2010
2012

128,000

This law would later be interpreted in multiple ways. There are at least three
variations of Moore’s Law, none of which Moore ever stated: (1) the power of
microprocessors dou- bles every 18 months; (2) computing power doubles every 18
months; and (3) the price of computing falls by half every 18 months.
Figure 5.4 illustrates the relationship between the number of transistors on a
micro- processor and millions of instructions per second (MIPS), a common
measure of proces- sor power. Figure 5.5 shows the exponential decline in the cost
of transistors and rise in

FIGURE 5.5 Falling cost of chips.

Packing more transistors into Moore's Law Means

less space has driven down Decreasing Costs
transistor costs dramatically as
Moore's Law
well as the cost of the products Begins 1965
in which they are used. Transistor Price
Source: Authors’ estimate. in U.S. Dollars

Ten

One

One Tenth

1965
1968 One Hundredth
1973
1978
One Thousandth
1983
1988
One Ten Thousandth
Packing more transistors into less
space has driven dramatic reductions 1993
in their cost and in the cost of the products
they populate. 1998 2014

2003

2008
One Hundred Thousandth

One Millionth

One Ten Millionth