Why Your Phone is so Fast: The Sports Car vs. The Truck

In 1965, Gordon Moore graphed the number of transistors—the tiny switches that you can think of as the “atoms” of computer hardware—that could fit on each microchip over the prior few years, and he noticed that the number doubled each year. He predicted that annual doubling would continue for decades—a bold statement known as Moore’s law. When building computers, one important decision is the vocabulary that the components use to communicate, called the instruction set. A big question in 1980 was whether instruction sets needed to change form as computers rapidly improved. Back then, most computer builders believed we should keep using the added transistors, following Moore’s Law, to give new computers more complex instructions. Instead, I believed that we should keep the instructions simple…and that turned out to be the most successful method. Many awards honored these contributions, the most distinguished being the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award and the 2022 NAE Charles Draper Prize.