Intel Compute Stick review:

The Intel Compute Stick is a $150/AU$229 PC (about £100) that fits in the palm of your hand. It plugs into a display's HDMI port, and -- when connected to Wi-Fi and peripherals -- offers the full Windows 8 experience. (Like all current PCs, it's eligible for a free Windows 10 upgrade later this year, too.)

But having the full Windows experience doesn't necessarily mean you'll have the best experience. The Stick houses a lightweight Atom processor that's usually found in Intel-based tablets, so don't expect to do any heavy image editing or high-end gaming. The Compute Stick needs to be plugged in to power at all times -- there's no battery -- via its Micro-USB port, and Bluetooth performance is finicky at best.

But this is nevertheless a exciting little experiment from Intel, as the Stick offers a great HD streaming experience you can fit in your pocket. You don't want it as a primary PC in your home, but don't too quick to dismiss it. Hobbyists and tinkerers especially may find the Compute Stick well worth the price; those with less patience should opt for something like the HP Stream 11 laptop, which offers a more polished, self-contained bargain Windows experience for just a bit more cash.

Design and features

There isn't all that much to the Compute Stick. It's a little bigger than a Chromecast, and plugs into a TV or monitor via an HDMI port. The Stick can't draw power over HDMI and there's no battery, so you're going to need to keep it plugged in, too: there's a Micro-USB charging port on the side.

The Stick is powered by a quad-core 1.3GHz Intel Atom Z3735F processor paired with 2GB of RAM, and has 32GB of storage space. A microSD card slot on the side can support up to 128GB cards. There's a USB port on the side so you can plug in external devices or a USB key, and Wi-Fi b/g/n connectivity is built-in. Bluetooth 4.0 is also available, but it's woefully unreliable -- we'll get to that in a bit.

The Stick runs Windows 8.1 with Bing. Don't be alarmed: it's a full version of Windows that Microsoft offers to device manufacturers at a deep discount. Bing is the default search engine system-wide when you first run it, but there's nothing stopping you from changing that once you're up and running. As it's a full Windows PC, there's nothing (save performance limitations) stopping you from installing whatever you'd like, including Windows 10. There's also a model that runs Ubuntu Linux, which is slightly cheaper at about $110.

The competition isn't too stiff in the PC-on-a-stick space, but the Asus Chromebit recently caught our eye. It's a bit cheaper at $100 (about £70, or AU$130), but also runs Chrome OS instead of Windows, with all the requisite drawbacks you'll find from the browser-centric operating system. It does offer a hinged design that'll make it a bit easier to fit into tighter spaces, which I like: I found I needed to use an HDMI extender cable on most of the monitors and televisions I plugged the Compute Stick. The Compute Stick also isn't fanless, but the low hum was pretty much inaudible unless I got very close.

Connections and performance

Intel is pitching the Compute Stick as a cheap way to cram a PC into a tight space, but there's only so much you can expect out of tablet hardware. The PC never felt sluggish while I used it, and things never took an interminable amount of time to load.

Streaming 1080p over sites like YouTube and Netflix works flawlessly, as did playing local HD media. I'd imagine the Compute Stick would be happiest as the streaming end of your media server, getting the content on other devices on your home network to play on any TV or monitor in your house using something like Plex.

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How Moore's Law Changed History (and Your Smartphone)

After 50 years, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's prediction about semiconductor miniaturization still holds up.

                   

When I was a kid, I got an idea from a puzzle book which I believed in my childlike way would make me fabulously wealthy in just a few weeks. The trick was to convince my mother to pay me a progressively doubling wage for doing household chores for a month—a penny on the first day, two cents on the second, four on the third, and so on.

Unfortunately for me, my mom was too bright to take me up on the offer. So I missed out on collecting $10.7 million and change after 30 days of doing the dishes, taking out the trash, and the like. Fortunately for all of us, the semiconductor industry did accept Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore's challenge to do something similar 50 years ago—and we continue to reap the benefits today.

Back in 1965, Moore, then the director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, was asked by Electronics magazine to submit an article making a prediction for developments in the semiconductor component industry over the following decade. So for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics published on April 19, 1965, Moore noted that the number of transistor and resistor elements on computer chips had been doubling roughly every year—and that he expected this to keep happening for the next 10 years.

It was a prediction that ended up extending far past its first decade. And what later became known as "Moore's Law" would prove to be perhaps the most reliable and enduring guide to the pace of technological advance in not just the semiconductor business, but in the computing industry as a whole.

But back in April 1965, Moore's observation, accompanied with a simple graph he'd sketched, wasn't even regarded as cover story material in Electronics. Instead, you had to thumb forward to page 99 to find the Intel co-founder's prophetic pronouncement amidst the writings of other industry experts. For just 75 cents, you'd have had the very first iteration of Moore's Law in your grubby hands, but finding it wasn't easy.

In an interview earlier this year, Moore, who co-founded Intel in 1968 with the late Robert Noyce, explained how the whole thing came about after Electronics asked him for the article.

"I took the opportunity to look at what had happened up to that time. This would have been in 1964, I guess. And I looked at the few chips we had made and noticed we went from a single transistor on a chip to a chip with about eight elements—transistors and resistors—on it," said the 86-year-old chairman emeritus of Intel.

"The new chips coming out had about twice the number of elements, about 16. And in the laboratory, we were creating chips with about 30 elements and we were looking at the possibility of making chips with twice that many, around 60 elements on a chip. Well, I plotted these on a piece of semi-log paper starting with the planar transistor in 1959 and noticed that, essentially, we were doubling every year.

"So I took a wild extrapolation and said we're going to continue doubling every year and go from about 60 elements at the time to 60,000 in 10 years."

To make things even more interesting, Moore himself did not at the time regard this remarkable prediction of exponential growth in integrated circuit (IC) complexity to be the most important point of his article. Instead, he was trying to stress that making ICs was going to get cheaper to do over time—potentially, a whole lot cheaper.

"I was just trying to communicate the point that this was the direction semiconductors were going," he said. "And this was going to give a tremendous cost advantage, which wasn't true at the time. The early integrated circuits cost quite a bit more than the pieces to assemble the similar circuits out of individual components.

"But one could see the trend was going in the direction that this was going to be the cheaper way eventually. That was my real objective—to communicate that we have a technology that's going to make electronics cheap. But I didn't expect this binary order of magnitude increase, the thousand-fold increase in complexity to be very accurate."

The accelerated pace of early IC manufacturing slowed a bit in ensuing years. Moore later revised his timetable for the doubling of transistor density in microchips from one year to two. More recently, we've seen the cadence at which Intel and other leading semiconductor manufacturers ramp new process technologies range from about 18 to 32 months.

Making Moore's Law Happen

Of course, the continued relevance of Moore's Law hasn't just happened by magic. Moore's prediction, while remaining accurate for 50 years, isn't actually a natural "law" like the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

 Shrinking the size of elements on computer chips so consistently and for so many decades has required incredible innovations like CMOS, silicon straining, VLSI, immersion lithography, high-k dielectrics, and most recently, FinFET or tri-gate "3D" transistor process technology. Those advances didn't just appear out of thin air because Moore's Law demanded they happen—brilliant, doggedly persistent people working in labs at universities and companies like Bell, Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild, Intel, Toshiba, IBM, Advanced Micro Devices, TSMC, Samsung, and elsewhere invented them and thus helped extend Moore's Law, not the other way around.

Moore made his original prediction about the pace of miniaturization in computer chip components as a way to highlight the attractive economics in semiconductor manufacturing. By his own admission, he wasn't terribly confident that it would hold up over time. But in the ensuing decades, Moore's Law has become as much a challenge to the industry to keep it alive as an axiom for how chipmaking works.

I never managed to trick my mom into paying me a fortune to make my bed for a month. But 50 years ago, Moore set the wheels in motion for an entire industry to dedicate itself to producing increasingly complex integrated circuits to make progressively more powerful computers and devices. As a child, I thought it would be really cool if I could use math to turn a penny into millions. Way cooler—and far more beneficial to all of us—is that we've turned transistors that were once the size of a human hand into nanoscale electronic switches powering smartphone supercomputers we can fit in our pockets.

Moore's Law has presided over that astonishing process of human ingenuity for the past 50 years. It's still holding up even as we approach atomic-scale limitations in making circuitry even smaller than it is today—a possible end of the road for Moore's enduring insight, or perhaps just the next great challenge.

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The law that predicts computing power turns 50

Today represents a historic milestone in technology: it's the 50th anniversary of Moore's Law, the observation that the complexity of computer chips tends to double at a regular rate. On April 19th, 1965, Fairchild's Gordon Moore (later to co-found Intel) published an article noting that the number of components in integrated circuits had not only doubled every year up to that point, but would continue at that pace for at least a decade.

 He would later revise that guideline to every two years, but the concept of an unofficial law of progress stuck. It not only foresaw the rapid expansion of computing power, but frequently served as a target -- effectively, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The revised law has largely held up over the past five decades, but it might not last much longer. With chips at 14 nanometers (such as Intel's Broadwell processors), the industry is starting to hit physical limits. Circuits are now so small that escaping heat is a big problem. 

While Moore's Law may survive for another couple of processor generations, there's a chance that chip designers will need new materials or exotic data transmission techniques (like quantum tunneling) for the rule to hold true. Semiconductor companies have run into seemingly impassable barriers before, though, so Moore may be vindicated for a while yet.

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Moore's Law is the reason your iPhone is so thin and cheap

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's observation 50 years ago set the groundwork for self-driving cars on the road and computers in our pockets today.

To get a sense of what society owes to Moore's Law, just ask what the world would look like if Intel co-founder Gordon Moore never made his famous 1965 observation that the processing power of computers would increase exponentially.

CNET

"It is almost unimaginable," said Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist for Intel.

"The implications would be so dramatic, I struggle to put it in words," said Adrian Valenzuela, marketing director for processors for Texas Instruments.

Jeff Bokor, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, found at least one: "Cataclysmic."

The comments aren't wild hyperbole; they underscore just how significant an impact one little observation has had on the world. Moore's Law is more than a guideline for computer processor, or chip, manufacturing. It's become a shorthand definition for innovation at regular intervals, and has become a self-fulfilling prophecy driving the tech industry.

Are you happy about your sleeker iPhone 6 or cheaper Chromebook? You can thank Moore's Law.

With Sunday marking the 50th anniversary of Moore's observation, we decided to take stock of Moore's Law. CNET staff reporter Ben Fox Rubin offers an in-depth look at the work that semiconductor manufacturers are putting in to make sure the rate of improvement is sustainable. Tomorrow, CNET senior reporter Stephen Shankland explores alternative technologies and the future of Moore's Law while senior reporter Shara Tibken looks at Samsung's lesser known presence in the field.

But first, let's explore the effect of Moore's Law throughout history -- and start by dispelling some misconceptions. Most importantly, Moore's Law is not actually a law like Isaac Newton's Three Laws of Motion. In a paper titled, "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits," published by the trade journal Electronics in 1965, Moore, who studied chemistry and physics, predicted that the number of components in an integrated circuit -- the brains of a computer -- would double every year, boosting performance.

A decade later, he slowed his prediction to a doubling of components every two years.

It wasn't until Carver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology who worked with Moore at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, coined the term "Moore's Law" in 1975 that it gained widespread recognition in the tech world. It became a goal for an entire industry to aspire to -- and hit -- for five decades.

"[It's] a name that has stuck beyond anything that I think could have been anticipated," Moore, now 86, said in an interview with Intel earlier this year.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

Moore's Law specifically refers to transistors, which switch electrical signals on and off so that devices can process information and perform tasks. They serve as the building blocks for the brains inside all our smartphones, tablets and digital gadgets.

The more transistors on a chip, the faster that chip processes information.

To keep Moore's Law going, chip manufacturers have to keep shrinking the size of the transistors so more can be placed together with each subsequent generation of the technology. The original size of a transistor was half an inch long. Today's newest chips contain transistors that are smaller than a virus, an almost unimaginably small scale. Chipmakers including Intel and Samsung are pushing to shrink them even more.

But size doesn't really matter when it comes to appreciating Moore's Law. More important is the broader idea that things get better -- smarter -- over time.

The law has resulted in dramatic increases in performance in smaller packages. The Texas Instruments processor that powers the navigation system in a modern Ford vehicle is nearly 1.8 million times more powerful than the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer that helped astronauts navigate their way to the moon in 1969.

And Apple's iPhone 6 is roughly 1 million times more powerful than an IBM computer from 1975 -- which took up an entire room -- according to a rough estimate by UC Berkeley's Bokor. The iPhone, priced starting at $650, is also a lot cheaper than a full-fledged desktop computer selling anywhere between $1,000 and $4,000 a decade ago -- and it can do so much more.

Just as critical is the time element of Moore's Law: the doubling of transistors every two years meant the entire tech industry -- from consumer electronics manufacturers to companies that make the equipment to manufacture chips and everything in between -- had a consistent rate that everyone could work at.

"It created a metronome," Bell said. "It's given us this incredible notion of constant progress that is constantly changing."

It also set a pace that companies need to keep, or else get left behind, according to Moore. "Rather than become something that chronicled the progress of the industry, Moore's Law became something that drove it," Moore said in an online interview with semiconductor industry supplier ASML in December.

While he didn't think his observation would hold true forever, chipmakers don't seem to be slowing down their efforts. "It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, so to the industry it seems like a law," said Tsu-Jae King Liu, a professor of microelectronics at UC Berkeley.

Life without Moore's Law

Nowadays, everyone assumes technology will just get better, faster and cheaper. If we don't have a sophisticated enough processor to power a self-driving car now, a faster one will emerge in a year or two.

Remove Moore's Law, and that assumption no longer holds true. Without a unifying observation to propel the industry forward, the state of integrated circuits and components might be decades behind.

"It's an exponential curve, and we would be much earlier on that curve," Valenzuela said. "I'm happy to say I don't have to carry my 1980s Zack Morris phone."

Intel's Bell imagines a more "horrifying" world without integrated circuits, one in which everything is mechanized, and common tropes of technology such as smartphones and even modern telephone service wouldn't exist. "The Internet would have been impossible," she said.

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