Moore's Law Time Machine — From Turing to LLMs and Beyond

Intel 4004

Year 1971

Transistors 2,300

Process 10 μm

Clock 740 KHz

The first commercial microprocessor. A computer on a chip.

Transistor Count

2,300

10³ — thousands

~2,300 transistors

A few dots on a chip the size of a fingernail

Your Chip vs. ENIAC (1945)

Selected Chip

Intel 4004

1971

2,300 transistors

Fits on a fingernail

ENIAC

1945

17,468 vacuum tubes

Filled a 50-foot room

~0.1x

relative computing power

The 4004 was slower than ENIAC for raw calculations, but it fit on a single chip.

Transistor Count

Cost Per Transistor

"What Comes Next?"

Future mode

📉

Moore's Law is bending. If doubling continued, we'd reach 200+ billion transistors by 2035. But atoms have a minimum size (~0.1 nm). We're already at 3 nm — only ~30 atoms wide.

🧊

3D stacking is the near-term answer. Instead of shrinking further, stack layers of transistors vertically — like building skyscrapers instead of sprawling suburbs.

🔬

New materials like carbon nanotubes and graphene could replace silicon. They conduct electricity faster and can be made thinner.

⚛️

Quantum computing sidesteps the problem entirely. Instead of cramming more switches, use quantum bits that can be 0 and 1 simultaneously.

"The curve is bending. But innovation never stops — it just changes shape."