I just watched the live UStream.tv feed of the IDF interview with Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. Npr host Moira Gunn did the interviewing.
Absolutely wonderful!
First, the UStream technology worked extremely well. The video was great. The audio was great. The chat room was (for the most part) well mannered and lots of questions were taken from the chat room and used in the interview. Wonderful job.
A couple tidbits I picked up from the interview that I was able to jot down:
* In terms of Moore's Law, he sees that eventually it'll hit a wall. He predicts a decade to a decade and a half out.
* If he were back starting in school today, he go into some form of biological sciences field.
* Early on people costed out systems at 68 cents a transistor. Today the cost is in the range of 10 pico bucks.
* Early on lots of people had concerns about yield problems with ICs. They thought that the yield would exponentially decay with the number of transistors. It didn't. Another issue at the beginning was that people were used to measuring things at the discrete component level. They didn't need to with ICs. It took people awhile to warm up to that.
* He credits co-founder Noyce for coming up with the idea of pricing ICs less than the cost of the discrete components.
* He predicts that once language recognition becomes a reality that computer interfaces will become conversational and that we'll interact with computers the way we do so with colleagues. In the meantime, he describes himself as a Luddite: He uses a keyboard and a mouse.
* Oh, and about the Intel name. They went through about 15 names. The first several they couldn't get. Eventually they settled on Intel. Amazingly, they later found out that the name was already taken. They had to buy it from a hotel company in the Midwest.
* Gordon Moore enjoys deep water fishing....and his foundation is active in conservation.



Incremental Blogger