Travel at the Speed of Light
More from the book: “Thank You for Being Late – The Optimist Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations” by Thomas Friedman. Friedman is interviewing Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, about Moore’s Law and the rate of change. “What happens if you keep doubling the power of microchips every two years for fifty years – he (Krzanich) uses this example: if you took Intel’s first generation microchip from 1971, the 4004, and the latest chip Intel has on the market today, the 6th generation Intel Core processor, you will see that Intel’s chip offers 3500 times more performance, is 90,000 times more energy efficient and is about 60,000 times lower in cost.” “Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would have happened had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as the microchips did under Moore’s law. These are the numbers: Today that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents. if automobile fuel improved at the same rate as Moore’s law, you could, roughly speaking, drive a car your whole life on one tank of gasoline.
