Moore's law was first described in 1965 by Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel. He observed that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubled every two years.
This trend has continued over the last half century, and Moore’s predictions have remained surprisingly close to reality.
The chart shows data collected by computational scientist Karl Rupp on the number of transistors per microprocessor over the last 50 years. The data is plotted on a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis. The line follows a straight path, indicating stable exponential growth.
The average transistor count per microprocessor in 1971 was 2,308. In 2021, it was 58.2 billion. That's an average doubling time of 2.03 years — extremely close to Moore’s law.
