What a visionary article and a delightful read.<p>To give another context to look at this in retrospective, here's [0] a die shot from a 2n3906 transistor made in 1965 (still available today). It's roughly 60µm * 60µm in size. By comparison a high end chip made in 2022 has 80 billion transistors in an area of 814mm^2 [1].<p>That is three hundred and fifty thousand transistors (350,000!) in the same area 58 years later.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2N3906#/media/File:2N3906_top_metal.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2N3906#/media/File:2N3906_top_...</a>
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_(microarchitecture)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_(microarchitecture)</a>
Wow, there's a surprising number of predictions he nailed here. One of the most impressive is the suggestion that "newly devised automation procedures could translate from logic diagram to technological realization without any special engineering" -- hinting at the possibility of logic synthesis, which wouldn't become viable until well into the 1980s (AFAIK?), but is now the standard methodology for complex digital ICs.
I always interpreted moores law as having 2 aspects, the scaling part (cramming more per mm2), and the economic aspect (for minimum component cost).<p>So when people say moores law is dead, it's often confusing as clearly things are still scaling (3nm crams significantly more transistors in than 7nm), but the cost per transistor has flattened, or possibly inverted a bit.