...AND CHEAPER...:

"[Gordon] Moore is my boss, and if your boss makes a law, then you'd better follow it," says Mark Bohr, who leads Intel's efforts to make advances in microchip design practical to manufacture. Moore's Law, of course, was first proposed by Bohr's boss in 1965, when Moore pointed out that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. Remarkably, the computer industry has maintained that pace ever since, training us to expect computers to become ever faster in the process.

After Monday's launch of Intel's newest line of processors, named Ivy Bridge, Moore's prediction is still looking sound. The chips are the first to become available from any company with features as small as 22 nanometers (the finest details on today's chips are 32 nanometers), allowing transistors to be smaller and packed more densely. Ivy Bridge chips offer 37 percent more processing speed than the previous generation of chips, and can match their performance while using just half the energy.

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