Moore's Law Was My North Star

Early this morning when the news hit that the legendary #gordonmoore had died, for the first time in my professional journey I felt a void.

I was a ECE major working on my senior internship at 维布络 , (Wipro did focus on PC and Minicomputer systems many years ago) when I was first introduced to #mooreslaw. I soon learned about some of the pioneers of the semiconductor industry, their journey from Shockley Semiconductor to Fairchild Semiconductor and then Intel. As an aspiring Computer Engineer, its simplicity, clarity and more importantly its audacity left an indelible mark on me that will live with me forever.

During my days as a budding Computer Engineer, #Motorola and #Intel competed for the leadership in the CPU and Microcontroller market with new releases headlining trade publications every few years. It was fascinating to track and attempt to predict what each vendor was going to release next. Note that this was long before #arm #nvidia emerged and #amd was not actively talked about.

During my career in Computer Architecture, Parallel Processing and Distributed Computing, I got to work with Massively Parallel Processors, Super Computers and phenomenal workstations like #SiliconGraphics which immensely benefitted from the innovations driven #mooreslaw.

There has been ongoing debate if #mooreslaw is still relevant or not. Pat Gelsinger , CEO Intel Corp in 2022 was clear about Intel's view on its ongoing relevance and how #intel and other CPU vendors are tracking the simple observation made in 1965.

Even though I moved on to working in other domains like Networking, Security, Cloud, Data and Analytics #mooreslaw was my first North Star guiding my career in Computer Engineering. There was nothing like it before and there has been nothing like it since then for me from a technology perspective.

I hope that the current generation of CPU and semiconductor engineers will continue to innovate and business planning will keep #mooreslaw or equivalent relevant forever.

#RIP #gordonmoore

Girish Bhat