The foundation of the new economy is the revolutionary explosion of computer processing power. Back in 1965 Intel Corporation founder Gordon Moore projected that the density of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip would double every twelve months. Our computers today have 66,000 times the processing power at the same cost as the computers of 1975. Our computers in 2010 will have ten million times the processing power of the computers of 1975. Such steep price declines produce enormous problems of measurement in calculating the rate of economic growth.
Different sectors lead economic growth at different moments in time.
Every Eight Years Worldwide shipments of semiconductors reached 300 billion this year. The increase in the unit volume of shipments understates the increase in total production by an order of magnitude. Today's semiconductor products are much more sophisticated than those of fifteen years ago. Back then semiconductor products had only one-thousandth as many transistors per square centimeter as today's semiconductor products. In Japan and the European Union the growth of these information and communications technology markets is slower.