In the mid-1990s, measured productivity growth for the semiconductor industry showed a pickup that coincided with an economy-wide acceleration in labor productivity growth. This pickup in semiconductor markets stems from an increase in the growth of real output that was, in turn, generated by what Dale Jorgenson (2001) called an “inflection point ” in the price indexes for the semiconductor industry. Jorgenson further hypothesized that the inflection point reflected increases in the rate of product innovation made possible by an increase in Moore’s Law, a stylized description of technology that currently states that the number of electrical components on a chip will double every eighteen months. Within semiconductors, microprocessors (MPUs) produced by Intel— the world’s largest producer of the chips that serve as a computer’s central processing unit—were the primary contributor to both the trend and inflection point in this price index in the 1990s. Pricing and product cycles for Intel’s chips also changed in the mid-1990s. As shown in the top panel of figure 1, price contours for Intel’s chips became steeper around 1995. Because most price index formulae boil down to functions of weighted averages of