Return of the multichip One of the predictions made by Gordon Moore in 1975 during an IEDM keynote where he refined the ideas that gave rise to Mooreâs Law was that chips would get bigger pretty quickly and that this growth would be a major contributor to scaling. He only projected as far as 1980 but his estimates pointed to die area at least doubling in five years: hitting 60 square millimetres by that time. In the mid-2000s, Intel did its best to keep up with the extrapolation courtesy of its reticle-busting Itanium processors that clocked in at almost 700sq mm. With just a handful of customers, it was clear that most of the industry was happier with smaller devices and using more of them.