Bill Gates admits envy for Moore's Law as it turns 50

Microsoft founder admits his own predictions have nothing on Gordon Moore's enduring axiom that computing power will double every two years

The 50th anniversary of Moore's Law prompted Bill Gates to take to Twitter last night to pay tribute to the profundity of the prediction made by industry peer Gordon Moore in 1965.

Linking through to a Scientific American article on the subject, the Microsoft founder – better known these days for campaigning against global poverty – admitted the predictions he had successfully made himself were not in the class of Moore's prognostication that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years.

Still going strong today, Moore's Law means Intel's latest microprocessor, the fifth-generation Core i5, is 3,500 times faster and 90,000 times more efficient than its first one, the Intel 4004, made in 1971.

Moore's Law is widely regarded to be nearing its death throes but at a gala marking the anniversary last month, the now 86-year-old Moore said he envisaged his prediction living on for up to a decade.

"The original prediction was to look at 10 years, which I thought was a stretch," he said in an interview with the New York Times last month at an event marking the law's 50th anniversary.

"This was going from about 60 elements on an integrated circuit to 60,000 – a thousand-fold extrapolation over 10 years. I thought that was pretty wild. The fact that something similar is going on for 50 years is truly amazing... But someday it has to stop. No exponential like this goes on forever."

If Moore's Law was applied to a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle, it would now be able to achieve speeds of 300,000 miles per hour and do two million miles per gallon for a total cost of four cents, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich said at the event.

Moore admitted he was initially coy about the prediction he made in the 19 April 1965 edition of Electronics magazine being elevated to the status of a law and given his name.

"For the first 20 years I couldn't utter the term Moore's law. It was embarrassing," said Moore, who co-founded Intel and is now the chip giant's chairman emeritus. "Finally, I got accustomed to it [to the point] where now I can say it with a straight face."