General

The Marconi Foundation Celebrates Gordon Moore

Famous engineers and mathematicians gathered to celebrate the single greatest individual in the industry that builds every CPU.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 9, 2005]

On Friday, November 4, the venerable Marconi Foundation held a symposium and award ceremony, presenting a lifetime achievement award to Gordon Moore and a fellowship to Claude Berrou. Robert Lucky, Chairman of the Marconi Foundation, presided with wit and brevity.

Moore and Murphy
Moore is successful and has the air of a genial, friendly man, although in earlier years he and his colleagues were ruthless and very competitive. Moore is known to everyone in the tech industry as the co-founder of Intel and the inventor of Moore's Law.

In his short and humble speech, Moore said that he had at first seen that the industry could double the amount of transistors on a chip every year, and later amended that to every two years. He admitted that Intel was lucky to choose silicon, because several other materials that might have worked initially would not have been adequate later on.

He concluded by saying that he expects to someday be "as famous as Murphy."

The question was raised as to whether Moore's Law was an observation of fact, something anyone could have seen, or a self-fulfilling prediction.

Others testified that the Law had given the industry a road map. If you weren't measuring up to it, you knew you needed to improve. Dr. Harry Sello, who was introduced as "Moore's lab guy", said that the Law was very challenging. Keeping up with the curve required more than design expertise. Entire industries were build around any single element in the production of chips, producing objects to more exacting standards than any industry had ever required before.

(Later, at lunch, we told Sello that it's a privilege to be an internet journalist at a time when the founders of the oldest ISPs, founded around 1990, are still around and approachable. Simultaneously nonplussed and amused, Sello replied, "you're looking at the guy who built the first integrated circuit with his bare hands in the sixities!")

We pointed out that the ISP industry was guided by the myth that internet traffic was doubling every hundred days. (The most authoritative study that we know of concerning the myth and providing actual facts is Andrew Odlyzko's Internet traffic growth: Sources and implications [.pdf].) Qwest and Worldcom, as well as many other companies, falsified their results to achieve this unrealistic goal.

The chip industry is therefore lucky that Moore got it right, and set a goal that was reasonable. It gave innovators enough time to make the change, while not forcing change to a pace that would have destroyed the profitability of any single invention.

—End