So you've probably seen this chart or one like it:

We aren't holding tightly to Moore's law  which states that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.  But we are holding a line that is close.

And that's pretty cool but the human brain looks at that and says, "big deal...it's getting faster...so what?"

Let's take a look at that chart in a way that the human brain can clearly see what "doubling" does over time.  Here is a representation of Moore's law (not the actual observations) changed into an arithmetic scale. [click on the image to see a larger view]

This stretches across the time frame from 1981 to 2021. It is only approximate, but does illustrate what is actually going on when we speak of doubling the number of transistors on an integrated circuit. 

Oh and by the way...the knee there, where the graph turns north?  That's 2007- 2009.

This also explains why the graph of Moore's law is displayed in logarithmic scale.  We quickly run out of paper.  If I stretch it backwards to 1970 and forward to 2040 and want to still have something intelligent to read...well, that becomes a big graph.