Gordon Moore, co-founder and former CEO of Intel, has passed away at 94. He was the last surviving member of the Intel Trinity, which also included fellow founder Robert Noyce and his first employee Andy Grove. Moore and Noyce previously worked with co-inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, before helping to found Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1968, the two parted ways and founded NM Electronics, which eventually became Intel.
A few years before that, in 1965, Moore wrote an article that envisioned the miniaturization of computers. To be precise, he predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year, leading to the creation and production of smaller, more powerful chips that would, in turn, enable technological advances. His prediction was dubbed “Moore’s Law” and was shown to be accurate in subsequent years. In 1975, he adjusted his estimate of the doubling of transistors every two years, although now major chipmakers disagree about whether Moore’s Law still holds.
In 1979, Moore was named Intel’s chairman and CEO before resigning from the latter position in 1987. Apparently, he served as a mediator between Noyce and Grove, and it was he and Grove who decided that Intel would focus on microprocessors instead. place of microprocessors. continuing his memory business. The rest, as they say, is history. Before Moore relinquished his role at Intel entirely in 2006, he and his wife established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with $5 billion in funding. The foundation supported environmental conservation efforts, primarily in the San Francisco Bay area, and donated to the science and technology departments of various educational institutions.
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