Mark Knecht wrote: > > > On Tue, Jun 4, 2024 at 3:12 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com > <mailto: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... >
They can do a lot with the space of a grain of rice. O_O It's amazing that these chips even pass quality control really. You either 100% right or it's bad. No errors. I saw a video on TV once ages ago and they were looking through a high powered microscope at the individual components. Not a magnifying glass or even a regular microscope. A high powered one. Microscope was pretty large too. That's getting tiny when you need equipment like that just to see it. That was also several years ago, maybe 5 or 10 years or more. I wonder where we will be in another ten years. Dale :-) :-)
