Gordon Moore

If there's a recent grad in your house, or you're one of the many buyers who think they can get a better deal at midyear than during the holidays, chances are good that you're looking for a computer. And your chances of finding a good one for a reasonable price are good indeed.

For that we can thank Moore's Law, which should more accurately be called Moore's Bubble. Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, predicted decades ago that the number of transistors that engineers could cram onto a wafer of silicon would double every 18 months for the foreseeable future.

Via The Valve, the IEEE has a special issue on The Singularity.   Ray Kurzweil and Neil Gershenfeld discuss

Chip designers have been in a furious race against Moore's Law -- the observation by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years -- with some experts suspecting the industry will soon be unable to maintain that rate of growth.

But research announced Thursday suggests chip designers still have a few tricks up their sleeves that may substantially advance Moore's Law. IBM and the Berlin-based Fraunhofer Institute demonstrated a prototype design of a 3-D, water-cooled chipstack.