SILICON VALLEY—WITHOUT SILICON
Dec 12, 2018
4 minutes
ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM SIMPSON
—JEFF BERCOVICI
![](https://article-imgs.scribdassets.com/j9tcg2p1c7n3gcn/images/file8NND6TE9.jpg)
Certain intervals of time we accept as givens. The earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours; seven days make a week; a half-hour sitcom is really 22 minutes plus commercials; Apple does a big-deal iPhone launch every other year. You know: the fundamentals.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore identified one of these intervals in a way we still associate with his name. Thanks to miniaturization, he observed, the number of transistors that could fit onto a single microchip was doubling every year, making computers exponentially more powerful, energy-efficient, and inexpensive. In 1975, he revised Moore’s law, as it
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