World Naval Developments

Heed Moore's Law

As in previous years, the Navy League's 2008 Sea, Air, Space Symposium was a paean to the central fact of the ongoing computer age, Moore's Law. Formulated in 1965, it states that the unit price of computing power halves every 18 months. At least up to now, that has usually meant that computer power doubles every 18 months. Over the 20- or 30-year life of a ship or airplane, that results in an immense difference between what computers could do at the beginning and what they can do when the platform is modernized or retired. If you attend the show often enough over the years, the impact of Moore's Law becomes obvious.