Gordon Moore at Intel

Intel’s co-founder was a philanthropist and the author of Moore’s Law.

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and giant of the semiconductor and technology industry, died on Friday, March 24, 2023, at his home in Hawaii. Moore co-founded Intel with Robert Noyce in 1968 after the two worked closely for a decade in the fledgling California semiconductor industry. The two took a different approach from industry norms and built Intel on the idea of manufacturing complex, general-purpose chips in high volume — the basic model that still underpins Intel’s business.

While Noyce, nicknamed the “Mayor of Silicon Valley,” is often credited with setting Intel’s early vision and much of its culture, Moore was the technology wizard who guided Intel’s early lead in silicon memory, the invention of the microprocessor, and the company’s shift from memory to microprocessors in the mid-1980s.

In the public eye, Moore is best known for Moore’s Law, the 1965 prediction that the number of transistors in a circuit would double every year. In 1975, Moore revised it to every two years, and it has since become shorthand for rapid technological change.