Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. It’s still going strong 52 years later, ever since 1965, when Gordon Moore made his prediction. That this law has has held for more than 50 years is amazing, almost miraculous-seeming. It reminds me of the wheat and chessboard problem (sometimes expressed in terms of rice grains), a mathematical problem expressed this way:

If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?

In the chessboard example the final number is a whopping 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (the 64th Mersenne number). Wikipedia reports this commentary:

In April 2016, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich stated that “In my 34 years in the semiconductor industry, I have witnessed the advertised death of Moore’s Law no less than four times. As we progress from 14 nanometer technology to 10 nanometer and plan for 7 nanometer and 5 nanometer and even beyond, our plans are proof that Moore’s Law is alive and well”.[25] In January 2017, he declared that “I’ve heard the death of Moore’s law more times than anything else in my career … And I’m here today to really show you and tell you that Moore’s Law is alive and well and flourishing.