The calculation you want is 3 * 2^13.3, which is 30,257 gigahertz, or about 30 terahertz. Much less, but still an incredible amount of processing power. However, I have read that current processor architecture will run into physical limitations within 5-10 years, so to continue Moore's law would require fundamentally new types of chips.
Actually, Moore's law stalled out about two years ago. These days the chip makers have stopped concentrating on trying to increase the speed of their microprocessors and are looking instead at increasing parallelism, both by switching to 64 bit CPUs and by working on multi-core chips.
Three years ago I bought a top-of-the-line workstation whch contained two Xeons. They run at 2.4 ghz. Today the fastest Intel chips are only about 50% faster than that.
There will be further speed increases in future, but not at the rate we saw historically. They've run up against fundamental physical limits: the speed of light, Planck's constant, and the size of atoms.
I've read that Ars Technica article before. It's a little obsessive in its "debunking," but whatever.
Moore's specific prediction had to do with the density of transisters. We could see the writing on the wall on that some time ago. But the changes in material, and the increase in parallel processing, and the decrease in power needs, and so on, have corresponded to ongoing increases in raw computing power anyway.
Hardware engingeers seem to have taken Moore's idea of doubling power about every 18 months to heart, and the software engineers have taken it to heart as well. I vividly remember that in the 1990s we were being told that Moore's Law had stalled out, or would soon: motherboards could not keep up with the processors, voltage requirements were becoming too high, and the limits of silicon were being reached. I was told even then that Moore's Law had finally stalled. Since then we've gone from 50-60 Mhz processors stuck on 10-20 Mhz busses to busses in the hundreds of megahertzes and processors in the giga hertzes.
I also recall as far back as the early 1990s being told that parallel computing, what amounted to multiple computers in one CPU, was mere pie in the sky fantasy that looked promising but no one knew how to use such hardware, to it being simply built into the chips; it's now an everyday thing and barely anyone even groks that it's happening.
The truth is that the "hertz" rating stopped having a precise meaning quite some time ago. The added complications render that manifest: motherboard speeds, parallel processing, anticipated processing, multiple instructions processed per cycle, and so on all add to ongoing increases in power without necessarily boosting the "hertz" rating.
"Imagine what you can do with gene splicing equipment in your own home."
Three years ago I bought a top-of-the-line workstation whch contained two Xeons. They run at 2.4 ghz. Today the fastest Intel chips are only about 50% faster than that.
There will be further speed increases in future, but not at the rate we saw historically. They've run up against fundamental physical limits: the speed of light, Planck's constant, and the size of atoms.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/moore.ars
Basically, it's not really a solidly stated "law". The closest it goes to is transistor densities, but that doesn't mean "computing power".
Moore's specific prediction had to do with the density of transisters. We could see the writing on the wall on that some time ago. But the changes in material, and the increase in parallel processing, and the decrease in power needs, and so on, have corresponded to ongoing increases in raw computing power anyway.
Hardware engingeers seem to have taken Moore's idea of doubling power about every 18 months to heart, and the software engineers have taken it to heart as well. I vividly remember that in the 1990s we were being told that Moore's Law had stalled out, or would soon: motherboards could not keep up with the processors, voltage requirements were becoming too high, and the limits of silicon were being reached. I was told even then that Moore's Law had finally stalled. Since then we've gone from 50-60 Mhz processors stuck on 10-20 Mhz busses to busses in the hundreds of megahertzes and processors in the giga hertzes.
I also recall as far back as the early 1990s being told that parallel computing, what amounted to multiple computers in one CPU, was mere pie in the sky fantasy that looked promising but no one knew how to use such hardware, to it being simply built into the chips; it's now an everyday thing and barely anyone even groks that it's happening.
The truth is that the "hertz" rating stopped having a precise meaning quite some time ago. The added complications render that manifest: motherboard speeds, parallel processing, anticipated processing, multiple instructions processed per cycle, and so on all add to ongoing increases in power without necessarily boosting the "hertz" rating.
Oops. I was obviously tired (I wrote that just before bed.)