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Moore's Law: 18 Months
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The implications of Moore's Law for computer component suppliers are very significant. A typical major design project (such as an all-new CPU or hard drive) takes between two and five years to reach production-ready status. In consequence, component manufacturers face enormous timescale pressures—just a few weeks of delay in a major project can spell the difference between great success and massive losses, even bankruptcy. Expressed (incorrectly) as "a doubling every 18 months", Moore's Law suggests phenomenal progress for technology over the span of a few years. Expressed on a shorter timescale... this equates to an average performance improvement in the industry as a whole of close to 1% per week. Thus, for a manufacturer in the competitive CPU market, a new product that is expected to take three years to develop and turns out just three or four months late is 10 to 15% slower, bulkier, or lower in capacity than the directly competing products, and is close to unsellable.
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The first qualitative revision of Moore's Law is affected by similar concerns. In its simplest form it says that the number of instructions per seconds, expressed as MIPS (millions of instructions per second) doubles every 18 months. Indeed, the famous 18-month doubling time may have its origin in such calculations. Moore has noted that a colleague at Intel came up with this number by combining Moore's two-year rule and increases in processor clock frequency (Yang, 2000). The increase in clock frequency means that the chip can do calculations more rapidly. Other things equal, the combination of increase in chip complexity and clock speed might, therefore, lead to a doubling of processing capability in less than two years.
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Gates's Law "The speed of software halves every 18 months." This oft-cited law is an ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to outpace the every-18-month doubling in hardware caopacity per dollar predicted by Moore's Law. The reference is to Bill Gates; Microsoft is widely considered among the worst if not the worst of the perpetrators of bloat.
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Roth says that means product cycles have to be "one Moore's Law cycle,'' or 18 months. Advanced research that may one have looked 10 to 15 years out now has to focus on producing returns in three to four years.
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"Moore's Law is important because it is the only stable ruler we have today, . . It's a sort of technological barometer. It very clearly tells you that if you take the information processing power you have today and multiply by two, that will be what your competition will be doing 18 months from now. And that is where you too will have to be."
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PALO ALTO, Calif -...If there is a religion here in the nation's high-tech heartland, [that's it. It's called] Moore's Law.... The doubling rate has held to about 18 months ever since, virtually dictating the pace of produce obsolescence and innovation, and indeed the pace of life, in Silicon Valley....
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