What is Moore's Law?

Moore's Law was proposed by Gordon Moore, one of Intel's founders. Its content is: when the price is unchanged, the number of components that can be accommodated on an integrated circuit will double approximately every 18-24 months, and the performance will also double. In other words, the performance of a computer for every dollar will more than double every 18-24 months. This law reveals the speed of information technology progress ^[1] . Although this trend has been going on for more than half a century, Moore's Law should still be considered as observation or speculation, not as a physical or natural law ^[1] .

Moore's law, known as the first law of computers, refers to the number of transistors that can be accommodated on an IC, which doubles approximately every 18 months and doubles performance. Moore's Law was discovered by Gordon Moore, honorary chairman of Intel (lnte), after a long period of observation ^[2]

As early as 1959, the well-known American semiconductor company Fairchild Company first introduced planar transistors, and then in 1961 introduced planar integrated circuits. This planar manufacturing process uses a so-called "

Generalized verification

In 1975, a newly emerged charge front-loaded device memory chip did contain nearly 65,000 elements, in line with Moore's prediction of 1965. According to statistics released by Intel Corporation, the number of transistors on a single chip increased from 2,300 on a 4004 processor in 1971 to 7.5 million on a Pentium II processor in 1997, an increase of 3200 times in 26 years. According to the forecast of "doubling every two years", there should be 13 doubling cycles in 26 years. After each cycle, the number of components integrated on the chip should be increased by 2n times (0n12). The number of components after a period of 26 years is quite close to the actual increase of 3200 times. ^[3]

Moore's Law summarizes the speed of information technology advancement. In the more than 40 years that Moore's Law has been applied, computers have changed from mysterious and inaccessible behemoths to indispensable tools for most people. Information technology has entered countless ordinary families from the laboratory.

Moore's Law has been in existence for more than 40 years, and people are not surprised to see that the level of semiconductor chip manufacturing technology has increased at a dizzying rate. Intel's microprocessor chip Pentium4 has a frequency of up to 2GHz. In 2011, it launched a chip containing 1 billion transistors that can execute 100 billion instructions per second. Whether this rate of development will continue indefinitely has become a question for people to consider ^[8]

On October 28, 2012, scientists at the IBM Institute in the United States announced that the latest

Moore's Law sometimes applies to green technology products. For example, consider DNA sequencersone of the core tools of green technology. In 1977, Fred Sanger was the first to sequence a complete viral genome containing 5,000 base pairs. Twenty-five years later, three billion base pairs were sequenced. The human genome was sequenced. The output of base pairs follows Moore's Law, but the cost of sequencing is not. The cost of sequencing the human genome far exceeds that of the viral genome. Existing sequencers can be described as ingenious, but they are bulky and expensive. They use wet chemistry to process DNA molecules in batches. Chemical reagents are as expensive as machines. What biology now needs is single-molecule sequencing, which involves processing one molecule at a time and sequencing it physically rather than chemically. Inventing such machines is a matter for physicists, who use gray technology to support green technology. The person who invented this machine and made it work reliably would make a significant contribution to biology ^[11] .

Single molecule sequencers can be much faster and cheaper than existing sequencers. It may be as small and smart as existing laptops, and it can process DNA molecules as quickly as DNA polymerase that converts single strands into double strands, reading bases into computer memory at a rate of one thousand pairs per second. At this speed, a single machine can read out a complete human genome in a month. With a lot of hard work and a bit of luck, we will continue to improve single-molecule sequencers, so that the scope of Moore's Law can be extended to the future-increasing sequencing speed by a hundred times every ten years and reducing equipment costs by a hundred times. For green technology, this will What does it mean? So far, we have sequenced the genomes of more than a hundred species, most of which are microorganisms, and determined a total of about 10 billion base pairs ^[11] . Our planet's biosphere contains about 10 million species, and their genomes contain about ten trillion base pairs. In computer science language, the genomes of all species on Earth add up to millions of gigabytes of data. This database is roughly the same size as some other existing databases. We already know how to store and search databases of this size. But before sequencing these genomes, you must explore the biosphere and identify the species within it. If Moore's Law is still valid when applied to DNA sequencing, we can complete DNA sequencing of the entire biosphere in about thirty years, and its cost will not be much higher than the sequencing of the human genome. The Biosphere Genome Project will allow us to begin to understand the biosphere in much the same way that the Human Genome Project will allow us to begin to understand human biology. The sequencing of tens of thousands of species will be a good start for understanding the biosphere and protecting the biosphere. If we understand what is in the biosphere, we will have a greater chance to protect it ^[11] .

Artistic Imagination of Multicellular Life in Early Precambrian