Tim Cook Pays Tribute to the Late Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore

Gordon Moore, co-founder and former chairman of Intel, died on Friday, March 24. He was 94. Tributes to the technology pioneer were shared on social media by Silicon Valley industry leaders over the weekend, including one from Apple CEO Tim Cook.

"The world lost a giant in Gordon Moore, who was one of Silicon Valley's founding fathers and a true visionary who helped pave the way for the technological revolution," said Cook in a tweet. "All of us who followed owe him a debt of gratitude. May he rest in peace."

In 1965, Moore famously claimed that the capacity and complexity of computer chips would double every year (10 years later, he revised this prediction to a doubling every two years). His prediction regarding the exponential growth of computer chip technology, which held up for decades, became known as Moore's Law.

Moore and business partner Robert Noyce founded Intel, originally named Integrated Electronics, in 1968. The two advocated for the use of semiconductor chips to power a wealth of consumer electronics, and made laptop computers affordable for hundreds of millions of people. Moore eventually became chairman and CEO of the company in 1979, and served as CEO for eight years.

In 2005, Apple transitioned the CPUs of its Mac and Xserve computers from PowerPC to the x86 architecture from Intel. The partnership lasted for 15 years until Apple announced that it would shift its Mac line to Apple silicon in 2020.