Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel and a Silicon Valley titan, died today at the age of 94, according to company press release. He was part of theeight traitors” who founded Fairchild Semiconductor, which became an incubator for many other Silicon Valley companies, including AMD. Moore and Robert Noyce, another member of the eight, founded Intel, originally called Integrated Electronics, in 1968. He eventually became the company’s president and CEO in 1979 and served as its CEO for eight years.
While Moore obviously played an important role in developing the technology that powers modern computing devices, many people will also be familiar with his name because of “Moore’s Law,” his 1965 prediction that processors would roughly double the number of processors. of transistors each year. (A decade later, he changed his estimate to a doubling every two years.) While that is no longer the case, the idea stuck around for a surprisingly long time.
In 2015, when asked about Moore’s law, he replied that “once I made a successful prediction, I avoided making another one,” according to a declaration from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
According to Intel, Moore’s recent activities were philanthropic, having worked with his wife on issues related to “environmental conservation, scientific research, higher education and the San Francisco Bay Area,” according to a statement from the founders on your foundation page.
