Moore’s Law

Moore's Law is the observation, first made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, that the number of transistors that can be economically packed onto an integrated circuit doubles at a regular cadence. Moore originally projected a doubling every year, then revised it in 1975 to roughly every two years, the figure most people quote today. It is not a law of physics but an industry-shaping trend that held for more than fifty years and drove the relentless cost and performance gains behind all modern computing, including Bitcoin mining hardware.

What it really predicts

Crucially, Moore's Law is about transistor count and the economics of cramming more devices onto a die, not directly about speed or power. For most of its run, each doubling roughly halved the cost per transistor, which is what made successive generations of mining ASICs cheaper per unit of compute. As transistors approach atomic dimensions, doublings have slowed and grown far more expensive, prompting frequent claims that the law is ending.

Why miners feel it slowing

For years, mining efficiency improved partly by riding Moore's Law to denser, cheaper transistors. With the cadence stretching out and leading-edge wafers costing more each node, gains now lean more on packaging, voltage tuning, and clever circuit design than on raw transistor doubling alone. This is one reason new ASIC efficiency improvements have become more incremental.

Moore's Law was sustained for decades by shrinking the planar transistor and later the FinFET, and it is distinct from the now-defunct Dennard scaling.