When will Moore’s Law expire? It’s the question that Mike Mayberry, the chief technology officer of Intel Corp., gets more than any other. The 1965 prediction, one of the most prescient in tech, stated that the number of electronic components on an integrated circuit would double every year for a decade—a formula, tweaked over the years, that continues to produce faster, smaller, more affordable gadgets. Gordon Moore, the engineer who coined the law, co-founded Intel a few years later.

Mayberry, age 61, joined Intel in 1984...