I am really uncertain whether the debate on Moore's Law and its demise is useful. Those that manufacture Silicon based microprocessors use the term as an aspirational item to encourage R&D outcomes for increasing density of transistors by making them smaller. Strictly the number of transistors does not tell you what you really need to know. The main question to ask of a microprocessor is how fast does it processes all those binary codes and distributes them to memory, a screen, a printer, speakers, a database etc.

The speed of a computer is also heavily dependent on the software used. One recurrent word I constantly see is "bloat". Many software upgrades add even more code that requires ever increasing processing time to wade through to produce the same result. For example later Microsoft Office versions slowed processing because of a bloat effect over their predecessors.

The question to ask what is POET's processing speed compared with the latest Silicon microprocessors. If a processor handles more bytes because of clock speed, internal and external light data transfer, then the density of transistors in a POET chip may not be as relevant when compared with Silicon processing. Silicon manufacturers have relied on increasingly expensive miniaturisation to produce improvements in processing speed because heat wrecks the chips at faster clock speeds than 3Ghz. It can just about get to 8 Ghz if the cooling is with liquid nitrogen. Anyone fancy that in their laptop.

I believe a POET microprocessor is intrinsically faster at processing because of its design qualities, particularly its clock speed, light date transfer, and reduced heat performance. A 100 nM POET processor will not have anything like the transistor density of a 22 nM Silicon 3D processor but it will have superior clock speed, faster internal and external transfer and less heat production. It also has a very definite capacity to be improved by miniaturisation and increased clock speeds. Thus, Intel reports a 37% increase in processing speed with its Ivy Bridge 3D processor over its previous incarnation, that's pretty modest for a $40 billion US investment; definitely not a paradigm shift. Anyone, give me a guess what processing power a POET microprocessor has at a 25 nM nodal point with a 90 Ghz clock speed. It’s the ability to process that will really count.

David