Gadgetory

it's not easy to make a prediction about the future of computers that will be true for the next half century but fifty years ago in 1965 the co-founder of Intel Gordon Moore made a prediction that holds true today he noticed that every year since the computer chip was invented those chips were becoming twice as complex his theory was that this would continue and it has about every two years man has been able to make computer chips faster cheaper and smaller I'm Bridget Carey and on this CNET inside scoop I'm joined by a colleague Ben Rubin who has reporting on this theory known as Moore's law now it's 50 years later since this theory came about so what's the significance now looking back the concept of Moore's law first started as an observation and now it's basically turned into a fact it's turned into a timeline that all chip manufacturers software developers device makers follow along and expect and for chip manufacturers especially if you kind of fall behind this two-year timeline that was first observed 50 years ago you could become irrelevant all your factories all your scientists all your research could all of a sudden just go up poof nobody really cares about your chips anymore because you're just not moving fast enough for consumers Moore's law has meant that basically the internet smartphones all the different types of technology that we see today wouldn't really be possible without the complexity of these chips growing as quickly as it has in your research what surprised you the thing that I would say first of all that surprised me in that I spent a lot of time learning about was just how small the different parts of a chip are today the first transistor which is the most important part of a chip was built by hand and these days they can make them with machines that produce them to be smaller than a virus transistors today you could fit more than a hundred million of them on a pinhead which is just kind of like you know mind-blowing to think about if you lesion yeah exactly and and they don't just make one transistor they make more than a billion of them to fit on any chip and then they make billions and billions of chips a year so just two consider the precision necessary to do this type of work it's really pretty incredible I went out to Oregon and saw Intel's research facilities over there and to really get like a full perspective of just how much work and effort is needed to do this kind of work I took a helicopter ride to see the 300 acre facility one of their newest facilities they started in the 90s and it's just absolutely enormous in this effort to try to develop and manufacture chips is there a point we're reaching where people are thinking that we're not gonna be able to make transistors any smaller we can't keep making chips you know twice as good every two years yeah I mean ever since Moore's law was was first coined or considered there's always been predictions that it's going to end at some point and if probably in some way it probably will and they're just you know physics dictates that you just can't keep making this stuff smaller and smaller it's gonna happen I don't think that from from my research it seems that the in the immediate future that's probably not going to be the case like we're not in danger of this happening anytime soon and even then scientists plan to kind of pivot where they're gonna find a way to make chips faster and cheaper but maybe not through the same way that they've been doing by making transistors smaller well thanks Ben for joining us on this CNET inside scoop and you can catch his full story on cnet.com I'm Bridget Carey thanks for watching