When the chips are down

Last month,

confirmed Moore's Law once again by extending to 45nm a manufacturing process that was thought to run out of steam at 65nm. Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel after whom the law is named, even provided a quote for the announcement.

Moore's Law is the empirical observation made in 1965 that 'the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months'. While it doesn't mean that performance will increase by a factor of two, it certainly implies densities, power consumption and heat probably will.

In Silicon Valley, people care about Moore's Law because there is a widely-held belief that it drives the industry. However, I am convinced that it hasn't driven the industry since the 90s.

Right now, there are a number of problems with the PC market that need to be addressed. The first, as represented by

and

, is that much of the real money is currently being made with embedded devices like the iPod and web-based, advertising-funded services like search engines. The second is that people aren't as excited about getting new computers as they are about getting new TVs. The third is that most people have more performance than they seem to need — it is adequate network speed and content access they lack. Finally, for new product opportunities like Origami/UMPC and Media Center PC, the user experience is far from the appliance experience the consumer demands.