On Sunday, Pride celebrations shut down a rainbow swath of San Francisco. In the shadow of the city’s iconic Coit Tower, chipmaker Intel held a nerdier and more select party.

At the five-hour event, 100 attendees from startups, venture capital, and tech giants drank in semiconductor-themed cocktails and detailed explanations of how sand is processed into silicon chips. It was a celebration of how exponential upgrades from the chip industry have propelled progress in technology and society over the past 50 years—and an argument that the party’s not over.

“It's going to keep going,” said Jim Keller, a semiconductor rock star who joined Intel last year as senior vice president of silicon engineering, and a cohost of the event. “Moore’s law is relentless,” he added, referring to the 54-year-old assertion by a former Intel CEO that the number of transistors that could be fit onto a silicon chip would double on a predictable schedule.

Sunday’s event was aimed at making clear that storied, troubled Intel can still deliver huge growth in computing power as the industry has provided in the past half-century. Keller, a chip industry veteran whose silicon creations have helped shift the trajectories of Apple and Tesla, joined Intel at the end of a rough decade. It missed out on the market supplying chips for mobile devices. Those pocket-sized gadgets undermined sales of PCs, where Intel had a de facto monopoly.

Intel still dominates the market for server chips that power cloud computing, but its two most recent generations of chip technology arrived late. In April, the company announced it was abandoning work on chips for 5G wireless devices, walking away from the next big wave in mobile technology, and a deal that placed Intel modems in some iPhones. The following month, Intel told investors that it expects profit margins to fall over the next two years.

Those concerns weren’t much discussed Sunday, where the focus was on the history, and the future, of technology. Intel staff stood by microscopes where the curious could peer at the tiny sculptures that are modern transistors, capable of toggling electrical currents on and off billions of times per second. In addition to Keller, speakers included Raja Koduri, Intel's chief architect, and Mike Mayberry, the company’s chief technology officer. Koduri has said he helped recruit Keller, whom he knew from when they both worked at Apple, to Intel last year.

The story of computing is bound up with Intel and Moore’s law. For decades, Intel maintained the doubling pace by inventing new materials, processing techniques, and designs for ever-smaller transistors. More recently, the pace slowed and the futures of Intel and computing have appeared less tightly bound.

The latest generation of technology the company has on the market, known as 14 nanometer, was around a year late when it fully launched in 2015. The next generation, 10 nanometer, has also missed its original schedule. Taiwan's TSMC is already shipping its roughly equivalent generation of technology, including in chips inside iPhones.

In 2016, a biennial report that had long served as an industry-wide pledge to sustain Moore’s law gave up and switched to other ways of defining progress. Analysts and media—even some semiconductor CEOs—have written Moore’s law’s obituary in countless ways.

Keller doesn’t agree. “The working title for this talk was ‘Moore’s law is not dead but if you think so you’re stupid,’" he said Sunday. He asserted that Intel can keep it going and supply tech companies ever more computing power. His argument rests in part on redefining Moore’s law.

“I’m not pedantic about Moore’s law talking just about transistors shrinking—I’m interested in the technology trends and the physics and metaphysics around that,” Keller says. “Moore’s law is a collective delusion shared by millions of people.”