To all those wishing to bury Moore's Law. There are more tricks left in it than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

We all know about "dual-core" chips. Intel has switched development here, AMD has them in droves. They're basically multiple chips drawn on the same piece of silicon, taking advantage of parallel processing on-the-chip. Great stuff. Makes chips faster, makes processing faster, and keeps Moore's Law going.

Now IBM (with Sony) is rolling out what it calls Cell technology . This extends the dual core philosophy, a single chip that passes instructions to as many as eight processors at once. (Think of it as an editor chip in the "slot" of a computerized editing desk.) IBM says it can handle up to 10 instructions at one time.

All the speculation surrounding the Cell involves where it might go, and what it might do. (They're putting it first into Sony's Playstation 3, but it's listed as a PowerPC advance.)

But that's now what you should be thinking about.

What you should be thinking is that this is just the beginning of something. Every advance that starts as 2x, then goes to 8x, quickly moves to 16x, 32x, and 64x. It was that way with Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM), the use of colors in glass fibers to dramatically increase the capacity of optical networks. It will be that way here, too.

All this without narrowing the lines between the circuits, mind you. It's Moore first' law without the need for the second.