Moore's Law: How a 1965 Prediction Shaped Every Computer and Server
In 1965 Gordon Moore noticed chip components doubling regularly. See how Moore's law drove cheaper computing, hosting and the cloud, and where it slows.
Moore's law is not a law of physics. It is an observation, made in 1965, about how quickly manufacturers were able to put more components on a chip, and the expectation it created became a target that the whole industry worked to meet. It is one of the main reasons why computers, and the servers that host websites, have become so much more powerful and affordable over the decades.
The 1965 article
Gordon Moore was then the director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor. In April 1965 the magazine Electronics published his article "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits". Looking at the history of integrated circuits, which at that stage had been in commercial production for only a few years, he saw that the number of components on the most economical chip had roughly doubled every year. He projected that this would continue for at least ten years.
The prediction was bold given how small the numbers were. Chips at the time held dozens of components. Moore was also making an economic point: the cost per component fell as more were packed onto one chip, up to a point.
Revising the forecast
In 1968 Moore and Robert Noyce left Fairchild and founded Intel. In 1975 Moore revised his projection, saying that the doubling would happen about every two years. This version is the one usually quoted. A related figure is often cited with it: a doubling every 18 months. That number is often attributed to Moore but is associated with an Intel colleague, David House, who combined transistor count with performance improvements. Moore himself didn't claim 18 months.
The name "Moore's law" is credited to the Caltech professor Carver Mead, who used it in the 1970s.
From the 4004 to modern chips
Intel's 4004 microprocessor, released in 1971, held about 2,300 transistors. Modern processors have billions. The numbers show the scale of the progress rather than the exact rate, but the trend held for decades because of a series of manufacturing advances: smaller transistors, better lithography and new materials and designs.
| Period | What the trend enabled |
|---|---|
| 1970s | The microprocessor and the first personal computers |
| 1980s-1990s | Desktop PCs, graphical interfaces, and cheap server hardware |
| 2000s | Multi-core processors, virtualisation and large data centres |
| 2010s onward | Smartphones, cloud computing and large-scale data processing |
What it meant for hosting
Cheaper, faster hardware changed hosting in three ways. First, the cost of renting a server fell, so a small business could afford a dedicated machine, and later a virtual one. Second, more powerful processors made virtualisation practical, which led to VPS plans and later to the cloud. Third, the rising baseline of performance allowed software to become more complicated without sites becoming unusably slow. A site that would have needed an entire server in the late 1990s can run today as a small slice of a modern machine.
The slowdown
The trend has become harder to maintain. Single-thread processor speed stopped rising quickly in the mid-2000s, because chips ran into limits of heat and power use. The industry shifted to adding more cores, which software has to be written to use. Making transistors smaller now involves enormous cost and physical challenges. Moore himself said that the exponential growth could not continue forever. Many people now describe progress in terms of specialised chips, such as graphics processors, and of better design, rather than a simple doubling.
Wirth's law and software bloat
A saying known as Wirth's law, after the computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, claims that software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster. Websites show this clearly: pages have grown larger over time, with more scripts, images and fonts. Faster servers help, but they can't fix a page that asks the visitor's browser to download a great deal.
- Compress and resize images.
- Remove plugins and scripts you do not need.
- Use caching, and serve static files through a CDN.
What the slowdown means for you
For website owners, the end of easy gains has a practical meaning: you cannot simply wait for hardware to fix a slow site. Efficiency now matters more. Well-written code, caching and a sensible hosting plan will give better results than expecting next year's server to make up for a heavy page. The good news is that today's hardware is already powerful enough for most business sites, so the choice of plan is usually about how much headroom you want, not about whether the technology can do the job.
The lesson for site owners
Hardware progress made hosting cheap, but it is your choices that decide whether a site feels fast. Start with a plan sized for your traffic, measure, and move up when your site actually needs it. A CDN reduces load on your server by delivering static files from locations nearer to visitors, and our VPS plans are a natural next step when a shared plan no longer has the headroom you need.
