MOORE: It’s hard to think of it that way the last few months. [Laughs.] [Intel earnings are falling amid signs of a downturn.] Maybe from the mid-’80s at least into the late ’90s, the real impact of spreading PCs around, opening up the Internet, increasing the use of information technology was moving rapidly.
You know, things get faster and use less power, increase reliability and, most importantly, they get cheaper. There’s no trade-off. It’s kind of a violation of Murphy’s Law [that what can go wrong, will]. We’ve been taking advantage of that now for 40 years and it’s beginning to have an increasingly strong impact.
Well, you know, eventually, the technology runs out of gas. You can only push it so far and then you run into problems. There is a minimum size that you can’t go below. And you know, that may be a decade away. I suspect the impact on the economy will continue significantly after we reach those limits, though. But will the last 40 years be repeated in the next 40 years? I think we’ll reach some limits well before we get that far down the road.
You can’t go smaller than several atoms because it’s not a silicon crystal when you’re down to an atom or two. The properties are not the same electrically. So the devices that have allowed us to make these complex structures, the little transistors, don’t work any more. That is the limit we approach.
My personal view is that what economists call productivity misses a lot of the important qualitative things. In our industry, we sell a memory chip with something like 66 or 67 million transistors for less than we sold an individual transistor for when I got into the business. It’s really a 67 million-fold decrease in the cost of the product and you get all the interconnections free. But that doesn’t show in the productivity figures. What shows up is you sell it for five bucks and you put so much labor into it.
Well, the semiconductor industry is a worldwide industry. They can enjoy the fruits of it. We’re just as happy to sell our products in Europe as we are in the U.S.
Japan doesn’t have the competitive impact now they had, say, in the ’80s but they still have the capability to be strong competitors. Actually, from a technological point of view, Taiwan is probably the strongest foreign competitor right now.
I think that the engineering has probably driven Intel but the products do enable people to change their business practices dramatically. And you know, that is part of what we call the New Economy, I guess.
Well, the New Economy that leads to all the unworkable business models, I guess I can see why that would drop out. But, no more Moore’s Law? The Old Economy never went away, and it certainly benefits significantly from the new technology. How you separate Old and New is something I guess I don’t really know.
