Gordon Moore, one of Intel’s co-founders and a Silicon Valley titan, died today at 94 years old, according to a press release from the company. He was part of the “traitorous eight” who founded Fairchild Semiconductor, which became an incubator for many other Silicon Valley companies — including AMD. Moore and Robert Noyce, a fellow member of the eight, went on to found Intel, originally named Integrated Electronics, in 1968. He eventually became chairman and CEO of the company in 1979, and served as CEO for eight years.
While Moore obviously played a large role in the development of the tech that powers modern computing devices, many people will also be familiar with his name because of “Moore’s law,” his 1965 prediction that processors would roughly double in transistor count every year. (A decade later, he changed his estimate to be one doubling every two years.) While that may no longer be the case, the idea held true for a surprisingly long time.
In 2015, when he was asked about Moore’s law, he responded by saying “once I made a successful prediction, I avoided making another,” according to a statement from The Gordon and Betty Moore foundation.
According to Intel, Moore’s recent pursuits were philanthropic, as he worked with his wife on problems concerning “environmental conservation, scientific research, higher education and the San Francisco Bay Area,” according to a founders’ statement on his foundation’s page.
