This afternoon, I and other members of the European press were treated to an audience with seven Intel fellows. One of the journalists had the bravery to ask them whether Moore’s Law – Gordon Moore’s infamous prediction that the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip will double every two years – was dead (an opinion recently expressed by Nvidia’s chief scientist, Bill Dally).

I should first explain that an Intel fellowship is the highest level of technical achievement within the company. Asking an Intel fellow whether Moore’s Law is a busted flush is like asking Bill Gates whether software is dead, or questioning Sir Paul McCartney on whether the Beatles were over-rated.

Their responses were both brilliant and brutal:

Tryggve Fossum (pictured with mic)

This is the only industry where the underlying material is constantly improving. If this wonderful ride stopped, we’d have to work a lot harder to find new features. We’d be forced into adding cup holders or something like that. The notion that somehow the market will be saturated by performance has been predicted for 50 years and it hasn’t quite come true yet. I don’t see an end to it anytime soon.

Shekhar Borkar (fourth from right)

Computer performance is like drugs. People get addicted to it.

Karl Kempf (far right)

The first microprocessor had 2,300 transistors. Now we have processors with 2.3 billion transistors. That’s what we do. That’s Moore’s Law.

Tryggve Fossum (again)

The number of people predicting the end of Moore’s Law doubles every two years.