On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 3:12 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: <SNIP> > Holy crap. That is amazing. As you say, just one out of all of them and it is a bad chip, whether it is buggy or just plain dead. I was expecting more like close to or into the billions. I was not expecting that. Can you imagine if a chip had to be made with discrete components, as in discrete transistors not a chip? A motherboard would likely need to be measured in yards instead of inches. Even that would be putting things as close together as they will fit. That's a LOT of transistors. Talk about a bulk discount. ROFL I checked out your link. I knew the "process" as they call it was getting smaller but it is smaller than I thought. They to the point where they almost don't exist. > > I started a thread maybe a decade ago about where computers were going next. Even then, clock frequency was getting close to the limit. At some point, a high frequency just can't go down a motherboard and all its traces. It seems to combat that problem, they are putting as much of the fast stuff as they can on the CPU die which can handle the higher frequencies. It kinda makes sense really. I still wonder if one day, we buy a board with a chip, memory slots and then a couple ports for video, data storage and user inputs. That's it. In a way, it's not far from that now. > > Dang!! >
Yeah, I loved working in that industry for the time I was there. While total transistor count is one measure, that changes a lot based on what the product is. A processor is larger than a network controller so you get big numbers due to the fact that it's a processor or a memory. To me the really amazing number is the transistor density. Stop and think about how small 1 millimeter is and then look at transistor density. The Intel 8080 had about 250 transistors in 1 mm sq. By the time the 8086 came along it's about 900 transistors per mm sq. The 486 was around 7,000, but the most dense logic processes these days, the technology that a processor is built using is awe inspiring. The AMD MI300 will have something like 144,000,000 transistors per mm sq. Moore's Law is an amazing thing...
