Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore Dies At 94

Matthew Broersma,
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Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. Image credit: Intel

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, known for ‘Moore’s Law’, dies at 94 after helping create modern tech industry and build Silicon Valley

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore has died aged 94 in Hawaii, the company said, leaving a legacy that includes helping build the modern tech industry and its Silicon Valley home.

Moore was part of the “traitorous eight” who in 1957 founded Fairchild Semiconductor, a company that played a key role in the creation of many other chip firms, including Intel rival AMD.

Moore and Robert Noyce another of the eight, left Fairchild in 1968 to found Intel, then known as Integrated Electronics.

He became Intel’s chairman and chief executive in 1979 and served in the latter role for eight years.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, pictured at right. Image credit: Intel
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, pictured at right. Image credit: Intel

‘Moore’s Law’

Moore became a household name because of his 1965 observation that the number of transistors in a processor had roughly doubled every year and was likely to continue doing so, a tendency that became known as “Moore’s Law”.

A decade later he revised the estimate to a doubling every two years.

The “law” became a foundation of the exponential increase in powerful, inexpensive electronics that has driven the tech industry ever since.

In his initial 1965 paper he wrote that integrated circuits would lead “to such wonders as home computers – or at least terminals connected to a central computer – automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment”.

At the time such things were the domain of science fiction.

Cheap electronics

“All I was trying to do was get that message across, that by putting more and more stuff on a chip we were going to make all electronics cheaper,” Moore said in a 2008 interview.

Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger said Moore’s legacy had “changed the lives of every person on the planet”.

“I am humbled to have known him,” Gelsinger said in a Twitter message.

In his later years Moore devoted his life to philanthropy, starting a foundation with his wife Betty that focussed on enfironmental causes, including protecting the Amazon River basin.