Today’s Pick: Moore’s Law(s)
Gordon Moore of Intel
Gordon Moore, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel Corp, was featured at last month’s annual Intel Developer Forum as part of the company’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit. In a wide-ranging interview with Moira Gunn, moderator of National Public Radio’s “Tech Nation� program, he reflected on everything from ecology to his choice of a career if he was to start over.
Read on for highlights of Gunn and Moore’s conversation.
On the company’s name: “We went through a lot of names. Bob Noyce’s daughter wanted to call it Moore Noyce Electronics. At first we called it MN Electronics. We wound up buying the name Intel from a motel company in the Midwest.�
On Intel’s introduction of cubicles and why he has the biggest: “Well, I remember we had just acquired a big building, Santa Clara 4 for those of you who have visited Intel, and it’s a building, you know, roughly square, so it had huge floor areas, a lot of inside space. And we started looking at what was going to happen as we brought in a lot of engineers. And you could see you were going to have hallways lined up with both sides with doors with offices in them, no windows. It was going to look like a, I don’t know, a prison block or something. So we said, “That doesn’t make sense.” And the alternative was leaving the space a lot more open. So we went ahead and did it with the cubicles that were available at the time. And then we thought, “Gee whiz, we’ve got these guys in cubicles. We’ve got some other people in offices.” That didn’t make sense, so we put everybody in cubicles. I still have the largest cubicle at Intel, I think. I got that because I had a big round table, and it wouldn’t fit in the small ones. I kept that table, therefore I kept my cubicle.”
On the limits of Moore’s Law: “When Stephen Hawking was through here once, he was asked… what are the fundamental limitations to microelectronics? And he typed out his answer, and he says the speed of light and the atomic nature of matter. And we’re not far from that… About as long as I can remember, the fundamental limits [minus] two or three generations out. So far we’ve been around to get around them, but I think in another decade, decade and a half or something, we’ll hit something that is fairly fundamental.â€?
On starting over: “If I were going back today, starting school again, I’d probably look something more in the biological end of things. I think the most important things — the most exciting things are usually at the interfaces. And the interface between computers and biology right now I think is a very productive area, dealing with extremely complex things, doing things that would not be possible without computers…â€?
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