For you geek theorists out there, this is huge.

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, postulated back in 1965 that the speed and capacity of computer technology would double every two years. This is Moore’s Law and, with very little variation, it has held true for over four decades. The exponential increase in process speeds and storage capacity hug the theoretical graph.

So where we are in the shadow of 2010 and Moore was asked if there is a barrier at the end of the graph. He said yes! Watch the video and hear it for yourself.

The computer on which you are reading this contains a processor in which millions of tiny electrical switches are crammed onto a 2 inch wide piece of silicon and copper. There has to be insulation around these switches. (Think of the plastic coating on your hair dryer’s electric cord that keeps you from zapping yourself.) In current technology, that insulation is as little as five molecules thick. That’s insane.

What Moore says is that you can’t make the insulation any thinner without things starting to short out. According to Moore, we are 10 to 15 years away from reaching the physical limitations of electrical shrinkage.

Does that mean that we can’t go any faster? Well, they used to say you can’t go faster than the speed of sound, and for a propeller driven play, that’s probably true. So, let’s say you can’t get more than 5 gigahertz of process speed out of a single copper/silicon chip. That may be true. But that doesn’t mean we’ll never see a 10 gigahertz computer, or a 100 gigahertz computer for that matter. It just won’t work the same way that processors work today.

Still, it’s a pretty amazing time to be a geek!