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Transcending Moore’s Law

Steve Jurvetson thinks this is the most important chart in technology business.

(It’s an updated version of Ray Kurzweil’s published work, posted with permission)

In this abstraction of Moore’s Law, Kurzweil plots computational power on a logarithmic scale, and finds a double exponential curve that holds over 100 years (a straight line would represent a geometrically compounding curve of progress).

In the modern era of accelerating change in the tech industry, it is hard to find even five-year trends with any predictive value, let alone trends that span the centuries.

Ray argues that through five paradigm shifts – such as electro-mechanical calculators and vacuum tube computers – the computational power that $1000 buys has doubled every two years. For the past 30 years, it has been doubling every year.

Each dot is the frontier of computational price performance of the day. One machine was used in the 1890 Census; one cracked the Nazi Enigma cipher in World War II; one predicted Eisenhower’s win in the 1956 Presidential election.

Each dot represents a human drama. They did not realize that they were on a predictive curve. Each dot represents an attempt to build the best computer with the tools of the day. Of course, we use these computers to make better design software and manufacturing control algorithms. And so the progress continues.

found via my favorite flickr blogger, jurvetson

Andrew’s $0.02: This chart is most impressive for all the reasons outlined above, but I’d add that it’s wild to see which medium dominated which time period and for how long. When will we grow beyond the constraints of the Integrated Circuit (if ever)? And, how much does a newer medium pull from an older medium in terms of design paradigms?