Moore's Law, Meet (Larry) Page's Law

Chip geeks are intimately familiar with Moore's Law, the axiom that says that, every eighteen months (or so), the number of transistors that can fit within a given area on a chip doubles. Put really simply, what this means in the real world is that the performance of a PC and other devices constantly increases. So why do PCs never really seem to get faster?Well, call it Page's Law. Page's Law was actually coined by Sergey Brin, who dropped in at the tail end of a Google press conference, and was asked about the pace of software and Web development."Page's Law is sort of the opposite of Moore's Law," Brin said. "Page's Law says that every 18 months software becomes twice as slow."Hardware makers have managed to offset that with incredible advances in compute power, he said, and Google is attempting to leverage that through improvements in software coding. The ability to process JavaScript has improved by 100 times in less than two years, executives said during Wednesday's keynote."We would like to break Page's Law and we would like our software to be increasingly fast over time," Brin said. Some of the methods include the company's Chrome browser as well as the company's Native Client initiative, he said.Source: Flickr/rafael_mizrahi