本文摘要：In 1950, at a time when there were fewer than 10 digital computers worldwide, Bill Pfann, a 33-year-old scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, discovered a method that could be used to purify elements, such as germanium and silicon.

In 1950, at a time when there were fewer than 10 digital computers worldwide, Bill Pfann, a 33-year-old scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, discovered a method that could be used to purify elements, such as germanium and silicon. He could not possibly have imagined then that this discovery would enable the silicon micro-chip and the rise of the computer industry, the Internet, and the emergence of the information age. Today, there are about 10 billion Internet-connected devices in the world, such as laptops and mobile phones, and at the heart of each of these devices, there is at least one such micro-chip that acts as its “engine”.1950年时，全球只有将近10台数字计算机。时年33岁的新泽西贝尔实验室科学家比尔o芬尼在这一年找到了一种制备锗、硅等元素的方法。

他当时有可能想不到，这一找到促使了硅制微芯片的问世，推展了计算机和互联网的发展，造成了信息时代的经常出现。如今，全球有数多达100亿台联网设备。而所有这些设备中，都最少有一块这样的微芯片当作“引擎”起到。

The reason behind this relentless progress is neatly contained in a prophetic law that was announced 50 years ago this Sunday, called Moore’s Law. The micro-chip is built with tiny electrical switches made of purified silicon called transistors and the law stated that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year. In 1975, Gordon Moore revised his forecast to state that the count would double every two years. The law has held true since.50年前，一个应验式的定律精妙地说明了了科技不断进步背后的原因，它就是摩尔定律。微芯片上有许多由洁净硅做成的微型电子电源，它们被称作晶体管。

而摩尔定律指出芯片上的晶体管数量每年都会缩减到。1975年，戈登o摩尔修正了他的预测，指出晶体管数量不会每两年刷一倍。

从此以后，这一定律未曾不济。Why is Moore’s Law relevant? Because this doubling of the number of transistors led to computer chips that could be packed with increasingly sophisticated circuitry that was both energy efficient and cheap. This led to the widespread adoption of computers, mobile phones, and the information technology revolution.为何摩尔定律经年可谓？因为晶体管数量的大幅提高让计算机芯片需要配备更加简单的电路系统，它们不仅节约能源，还十分低廉。这造成了计算机、手机的普及，推展了信息技术的革命。

The price of computation is about 10 million times cheaper than it was 40 years ago, and the computing power held in a smart phone outstrips the workstations that computer scientists used in their offices in the 1990s. That we have been able to so far hold true to Moore’s Law is the reason that the electronic circulation of information has been commoditized, changing the way many of us learn, bank, travel, communicate and socialize.计算机的价格相比40年前，早已低廉了一千万倍，而一部智能手机享有的计算能力，早已多达了20世纪90年代计算机科学家用于的工作站。至今为止，摩尔定律仍然限于，也因为如此，信息的电子流合显得商品化，转变了我们当中许多人自学、储蓄、旅行、交流和社交的方式。Take the example of social networking using a mobile phone. It works because the cost of a transistor has dropped a million fold and computing is about 10,000 times more energy efficient since 1980, when this writer first went to engineering school. Consequently, a $200 smart phone powered by a biscuit-sized battery contains a micro-chip with a few billion transistors in it and enough computing power to digitally process an image, and then upload and share it wirelessly using powerful mathematics to encode the data. This is a consequence of Moore’s Law in action.以用于手机展开社交为事例。之所以能构建这一点，是因为从1980年（当时笔者刚转入工程学院）至今，晶体管的价格减少了几百万倍，计算出来的能效提升了几万倍。

因此，售价200美元、由一块饼干大小的电池作为能源的智能手机中，享有一块包括几十亿晶体管的微芯片，其计算能力不足以对图片展开数字化加工，运用强劲的数学运算能力编码其数据，再行通过无线网络上载和共享它。这就是摩尔定律起到下的成果。Yet, on its 50th anniversary, there are tell-tale signs that Moore’s Law is slowing, and we are almost certain that the law will cease to hold within a decade. With further miniaturization silicon transistors will attain dimensions of the order of only a handful of atoms and the laws of physics dictate that the transistors and electronic circuits will cease to work efficiently at that point. As Moore’s Law’s slows down, innovations in other areas, such as developments in software, will pick up the slack in the short-term.然而，在它问世50周年之际，有数迹象指出摩尔定律下的快速增长开始上升，我们也完全可以确认，在接下来的十年内，它难道将未尝正式成立。

硅晶体管之后微型化下去，将超过仅有所含少量原子排序的维度，根据物理定律，这种情况下晶体管和电子电路将无法有效地工作。随着摩尔定律下的快速增长上升，其他领域的创意，如软件方面的发展，将在短期内顶替这一缺口。But in the longer-term, there will be fundamental changes in the essential design of the classical computer that, remarkably, has remained unchanged since the 1950s. Designed for precise calculations, today’s computing machines do not make inferences, and qualitative decisions, or recognize patterns from large amounts of data efficiently. The next substantive leap forward will be in computers with human-like cognitive capabilities that are also energy efficient. IBM’s Watson, the computing system that won the television game show Jeopardy! in 2011, consumed about 4000 times more energy than its human competitors. This experience reinforced the need for new energy efficient computing machines that are designed differently from the sequential, calculative methodology of classical computers and are inspired, perhaps, by the way biological brains work.但从长年来看，从20世纪50年代至今不曾转变的传统计算机的基本设计，将不会经常出现根本性的变革。如今的计算机能用来展开准确计算出来，但它们无法高效地从大量数据中得出结论推测，作出定性决策或识别模式。

下一个实质性的飞到将不会经常出现在那些享有类人理解能力且低能效的计算机上。IBM的计算机系统沃森在2011年的智力挑战节目“Jeopardy!”上取得胜利，但它消耗的能量是与它同台对垒的人类运动员的4000倍。

这一经历突显了对新型低能效计算机的市场需求。它们要与用于顺序计算方法的经典计算机有所区别，设计者或许将从生物大脑的运转方式中吸取启发。A journalist recently asked me whether the continuation of Moore’s Law was indispensable. It is the beauty of the collective enterprise of human innovation that which ensures that nothing is indispensable indefinitely for technology to progress. Decades later one might look at the era of Moore’s Law as a golden period where computers came of age through a masterful display of an industry’s ability to miniaturize and create billions of flawless and identical copies of tiny circuits at factories throughout the world. But, much as a pack of migratory birds flying in V-formation rotate in at the lead position, there will, at that future time, be many other technologies that will have carried us forward in the information age.一位记者最近回答我，摩尔定律的持续是不是不可或缺的。

人类创意这项集体活动之美，就在于确保了没什么对于技术变革而言是不可或缺的。几十年后，人们也许不会将摩尔定律的年代看做黄金时代，这个年代的计算机最初是一个行业实力的反映，后来计算机渐渐小型化，全球的工厂生产了数以亿计一模一样的极致微型电路。但就像候鸟群会以V字队列飞过在领头者旁边一样，未来不会有许多其他技术引导着我们在信息时代继续前进。

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