Are microchips too fast for mere mortals?

Moore's Law means our processors get faster every year -- but no law can find uses for all that computing power.

By Scott Rosenberg

Jun 18, 1998 | Faster! Cheaper! Smaller! The war cries of the personal-computer revolution are now the stuff of popular myth. Even digital neophytes understand that next year's machines will beat the pants off this year's -- and that, just as surely, computer prices will drop.

The computer industry's ability to deliver on those promises of speed, economy and miniaturization depends on a principle known as Moore's Law. In 1965, Intel Corporation co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors that could be crammed onto a microchip would double at a regular interval. Moore has adjusted the exact rate a couple of times; originally set at a year, since the 1970s it has been roughly every 18-24 months.

Reality -- prodded chiefly by the manufacturing whizzes at Intel -- has so far lived up to Moore's calculations. Prodigious improvements in chip technology are measurable by engineering standards like clock speed, millions of instructions per second and transistors per square inch. Today's computer marketing focuses almost exclusively on processor speed, as in the recent advertising war between Intel and Apple: Intel's commercials feature "Bunny People," clad in the space-suit-like garb that's de rigueur in super-immaculate chip-fabrication plants, dancing in praise of the Pentium II -- while Apple's spots mock the competition as snails and apologize for "toasting" them.

But when the noise dies down, a nagging doubt persists: Sure, our chips work faster. But do we? Or is Moore's Law too fast for mere human beings to keep up?

This isn't an abstract or rhetorical question. For one thing, if all that costly computing power we've invested in hasn't actually boosted our productivity, then the global economy is in big trouble. But while the economists engage in that learned debate, the question has a more personal dimension, too. If chip speeds have outstripped the uses we can put them to, then maybe we don't need to heed the call of the Bunny People. Maybe that new, top-of-the-line machine isn't a must. Maybe the snail's life is good enough for now.

Next Page: "Application stagnation," the Net effect and the "Death of the PC-centric era"

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