Moore on Moore’s Law

My original message was to get the idea across that integrated circuits were going to be cheap someday. They were not cheap at the time. I never expected it to be an accurate prediction. It turned out to be more accurate than I ever envisioned. Then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The industry recognized it had to stay on that rate of progress or fall behind.

It’s a peculiar thing. Technology [scaling] allows you to offer higher performance at a cheaper cost, so you can’t allow yourself to fall behind. On the other hand, a company can’t get very far ahead, because then it has to bear the cost of the equipment by itself.

An Interview with Gordon Moore from March 2005.

Additional Reading: His obituary in The Economist