Doubling Processor Power

The reason our society and economy have become so rapidly and thoroughly digitized in recent years is that the underlying computer processors have been able to keep up, and exceed, all the workloads we’ve thrown at them. It’s Moore’s Law in action. But will there be a point of diminishing growth in processing power?
In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, postulated that that number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit — and thus processing power — would double every two years.
The rest of the story is the stuff of computer industry legend. It turned out that Moore was right on the money, and the processing power of semiconductors keeps outpacing the workloads we put on them — from high-volume transaction processing to simulations to graphics. At the same time, the form factors that support these applications keep getting smaller and smaller.