Forgetting Moore's Law [Body of Knowledge

Abstract

It is argued that some ideas, such as Moore's law, are so ingrained in our thought that we sometimes miss articles that tell us how those ideas are changing. The article by Kim, et al. titled "Leakage Current: Moore's Law Meets Static Power" [ibid., vol. 36, no. 12, pp. 68-75, Dec. 2003] ultimately teaches us a great deal about the dynamic nature of our computing environments, although those lessons had less to do with Moore's law than the rise of mobile computing platforms. It appeared at a time when the conventional development that had been predicted by Moore's law was coming to an end and mobile cloud computing was just on the horizon. Kim and his coauthors explained the issues of low power computing and gave Computer readers a tutorial on the nature of lower power computing and the problems that would need to be solved to deliver low power computing. They had no interest in having us forget Gordon Moore or his law. They were just telling us that the world was about to change and that we should be prepared.