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Comment on IBM smashes Moore's Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

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My understanding was that Moore's law states that the number of transistors that you get for a given cost doubles every 18 months. Hence I don't think any result shown by researchers in a lab can be said to "smash" it until a similar technique is used in production for chips you can actually buy.

Moore's law is one of the most misinterpreted laws :)

It states that the number of transistors per INGOT SLICE will double each 18 months.

Ingot (in semiconductor manufacturing) is a slice of silicon monocrystalline suitable for photolithographic and chemical processing. The main point is that while transistors are getting smaller, ingot slices are getting bigger.

Edit: I mean misquoted (misinterpretation is a result).

Yes, I agree it's often misquoted. I don't see where it says anything about ingot slices in his original statement (see eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#History) though; I was thinking of the statement "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year", etc.

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