In the mild sunny weather, I and dozens of people in the press and media delegation from many countries visited the museum located at the headquarters of Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, Silicon Valley (California, USA). What caught our eyes was a portrait of Mr. Gordon Moore (1929 - 2023) enlarged on the main facade of the Intel headquarters building.
When Dr. Moore died at the age of 94 in March 2023, Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote: "The world has lost a giant in Gordon Moore, one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley and a true visionary who helped pave the way for the technology revolution."
Intel headquarters in Santa Clara
Tim Cook's words are not exaggerated. Not only did he co-found Intel Corporation in 1968, Dr. Gordon Moore is also the owner of Moore's Law, which laid an important foundation for semiconductor chips for more than half a century. Announced in 1965, Moore's Law states that the number of transistors per square inch will double every 24 months. The increase in the number of transistors will help increase the performance of the chip. Moore's Law not only opened up the development of Intel, but also of the entire technology industry in Silicon Valley.
From the foundations of Silicon Valley
However, nearly 20 years before Intel was born, with the available starting points to serve military purposes, Silicon Valley began to welcome the first platforms.
In 1951, in order to build financial resources to serve the development of Stanford University (located in the Silicon Valley area), and at the same time create working conditions for local students after graduation, Professor Frederick Terman proposed leasing Stanford land to build an office area for businesses called Stanford Industrial Park (later Stanford Research Park). At that time, Professor Terman focused on inviting high-tech companies and many businesses gathered here, which later became big names in the technology industry.
In 1956, William Shockley, co-inventor of the first working transistor, moved from New Jersey to Mountain View in Silicon Valley to start the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, which contributed significantly to the development of technology in Silicon Valley. Therefore, both scientists Frederick Terman and William Shockley are often called the "fathers of Silicon Valley".
AMD introduces Ryzen 7000 generation CPU series
However, these factors were not enough to launch Silicon Valley! Along with human resources from Stanford University and technological achievements from inventors, Silicon Valley also had the convergence of venture capital funds in the early 1970s that helped create investments to promote the development of many startups in Silicon. Thanks to the resources of venture capital funds, in December 1980, Apple issued its initial public offering and reached a market value of 1.5 billion USD - an impressive figure at that time. By the 1980s, Silicon Valley became the place where the largest number of venture capital funds gathered in the world. Along with the presence and expansion of the banking system, the network of lawyers and law firms... to comprehensively support startups here.
To the competition beyond the limit
Exactly one year after Intel was founded, AMD Corporation was also founded in 1969 and later became Intel's key competitor for many years. As the two "bosses" in the production of central processing units (CPUs) for personal computers, Intel and AMD spent decades competing in CPU performance, in which Moore's Law was always an important basis.
Qualcomm event to launch Snapdragon mobile platform series in November 2022
In recent years, as artificial intelligence (AI) technology has exploded, the need to innovate so that semiconductor chips can develop beyond their limits has become even more urgent. In August 2022, attending the AMD event held in Texas (USA), the author witnessed the launch of the latest generation of Ryzen 7000 Series processors with a process of only 5 nm (5 nm transistor size) to increase the number of transistors per unit area.
Less than a year later, at the Intel Innovation event held in September 2023 in San Jose (California, USA), Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced that the corporation was maintaining Moore's Law by replacing chip substrate material with glass to increase the number of transistors on semiconductor chips. This is considered a measure for Intel to maintain Moore's Law in chip development even after 2030.
However, the competition beyond the limit is not only Intel and AMD. Another "player" to mention is Qualcomm. After many years focusing on the chip processing segment for smartphones and tablets, Qualcomm has gradually expanded into the chip processing line for highly mobile laptops. In December 2019 in Hawaii (USA), before the Covid-19 pandemic, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 8c platform with a 7nm process for laptops. In November 2022, also in Hawaii, the 3rd generation Snapdragon 8cx platform was launched for laptops with a process of only 5nm. And most recently, at the end of 2023, the "younger brother" of Snapdragon 8cx, Snapdragon X Lite, was launched with a process of only 4nm.
Not stopping there, the AI boom also opened up opportunities for NVIDIA - a company co-founded by Mr. Jensen Huang, an AMD "veteran" who also studied at Stanford. In September 2022, NVIDIA introduced the H100 graphics processing unit (GPU) priced at more than 30,000 USD (more than 700 million VND). With a high price in the context of businesses tightening their belts, NVIDIA unexpectedly achieved great success because the H100 met the demand for AI development when ChatGPT exploded globally. In the third quarter of 2023 alone, NVIDIA sold more than 500,000 H100 GPUs. NVIDIA's market value skyrocketed to over 1,000 billion USD. NVIDIA also joined hands with Microsoft to produce CPUs based on ARM architecture for laptops.
Not only competing in products, billionaire Jensen Huang also came up with Huang's law. Accordingly, the performance of semiconductor chips will increase 25 times after 5 years, while with Moore's law, the increase in the same period is only about 10 times. This is considered to open a higher limit in the race for the throne in the Siliconomy era.
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