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One of the more interesting threads in the news this month was on the time-honored and much acclaimed precept known to the world as Moore’s law. The famous Moore’s law, first posed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, is often used by industry analysts to predict the rapid advance in the complexity of integrated circuits. Eric Lai, at the Computerworld site, wrote a column pointing out that the recent popularity of the tiny, low-capacity ARM chips used in iPods and Blackberries seems to violate Moore’s Law. Slashdot picked up the story, and all the bloggers weighed in.
Lai is certainly correct that the recent trend toward low-tech high-tech has confounded the predictions of experts. In addition to the iPods are netbook computers and other small, portable gadgets that appear immune from the once-certain wisdom that computers just keep getting more complicated. The question of whether this trend actually violates Moore’s Law, though, calls for a little more analysis.

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