Transistor Size Changes

During 1971 the first commercial microprocessor was 1,000 times bigger than today’s when it was released.

During 2007, the state-of-the-art for Intel was 3.3 million transistors per square millimeter. Now in 2018, 100 Million Transistors are in each square millimeter.

Intel has just announced the first microchip that contains more than two billion transistors - tiny switches that together perform the calculations in computers.

As of 2017, the largest transistor count in a commercially available single-chip processor is 19.2 billion— AMD's Ryzen-based Epyc. In other types of ICs, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), Intel's (previously Altera) Stratix 10 has the largest transistor count, containing over 30 billion transistors

Intel has just announced the first microchip that contains more than two billion transistors. The chip, known as Tukwila, marks a milestone in chip density technology.
Meanwhile software bloat diminishes the amazing hardware changes and common laptop computers still lag as they did a number of years ago. Just as with TVs, hardware is progressing faster than our ability to take advantage of it.

Intel's latest chips, based on Kaby Lake, are made using a 14-nanometer process, and the company is now moving to 10-nm with its upcoming Cannonlake chip, which was shown in a PC at CES 2017.
14 nm – 2014 still using in 2018
10 nm – 2017 (now 2019)
 7 nm – 2018 (7nm pilot plant set in 2017 to determine how to make in volume)
 5 nm – 2020

Incidentally, to offer perspective, nano means one-billionth, so one nanometer (nm) is one-billionth of a meter (3.2 feet). There are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch. A strand of human DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter. A human hair is approximately 80,000 - 100,000 nanometers wide.

Flash Drives Getting Smaller

The NAND (not and) flash technology that Toshiba introduced in 1989 (130nm or nanometers), making thumb drives, SSDs, (solid state drive) and smartphone memory, has finally reached a development dead end. Toshiba and other major manufacturers of 15 nm NAND flash are stopping new development and focusing development on 3D NAND.

For comparison, a strand of human DNA is 2.5 nm in diameter, and there are 25,400,000 nanometers in one inch. 1 centimeter = 10,000,000 nanometers.

Intel says it will be able to fit 1TB (terabytes) on a card just two millimeters thick in an object half the size of a postage stamp.

A square inch drive with a Terabyte of capacity can contain more bits than the Milky Way has stars (about 200 billion to 400 billion stars as estimated by astronomers). Obviously, when it comes to computers, size matters and smaller is better. Incidentally, My blog spoke of terabytes in 2010 LINK

Computer on a Stick

Intel is coming out with a 'Compute Stick' that is a full personal computer. It is about the size of a USB memory stick. On one end, the device has a full-size HDMI plug which attaches to your TV or monitor. On its side is a microUSB port which plugs into the wall for power using a standard USB cable. A second, full-size USB port allows you to attach peripherals and a microSD card slot provides for memory expansion.

Not to get too technical, but it is a quad-core Atom-powered mini PC with 2GB of RAM, 32GB eMMC storage, running Windows 8.1. The price when it comes out later this spring should be about US $150.

It also has a power button, and in addition to its USB port, it can pair with a keyboard and mouse using Bluetooth. Since Bluetooth sends a signal to about 30 feet, you can sit in your easy chair and have the best of TV and PC on one device, with no extra wires or gadgets. It also supports 802.11n Wi-Fi for connecting to the Internet and your home network. Now you can have a real PC TV with a keyboard, etc. No longer necessary to send YouTube videos from your PC as they are already on the screen. Am very sure I need one of these and hope by the time it is available I will be able to explain/justify to myself why.

New Mini Computers

The drive is on for TVs to get larger and computers to get smaller. Last year Intel introduced Edison, a computer the size of a postage stamp. This year it introduced a new model called Curie, which is so small that it could be built into a button on a shirt.

Curie is based on the Quark SE core, Key Features:
• A low-power, 32-bit Intel® Quark™ SE SoC
• 384kB Flash memory, 80kB SRAM
• A low-power integrated DSP sensor hub with a proprietary pattern matching accelerator
• Bluetooth* Low Energy
• 6-axis combo sensor with accelerometer and gyroscope
• Battery charging circuitry.
It is for both the wearable fitness market and biometric and security applications, with additional tie ins to other brands like Fossil (watches) and Oakley (glasses). Unlike TVs, when it comes to computers, smaller is better.

Intel Wearable Awards

Intel’s Make It Wearable is a global initiative to inspire ideas and fuel innovation that will evolve personal computing in exciting new ways.

The Development track focuses on concepts that are both excitingly innovative and feasible to execute. They also demonstrate innovative solutions, creative implementation, technical feasibility, intelligent business planning, and potential for long-term success.

Intel is on a mission to identify and support wearable products and/or technology that can go to market in near future. This track features 3 rounds. All submissions are evaluated in round 1 (idea proposal submission), forty advance to round 2, ten advance to round 3, and three winners are chosen. Semifinalists and finalists gain expert support and education aimed at evolving their proposals into fully developed designs and business plans.

Nixie, the Selfie-Taking Drone, won. It is a wristband that unfolds into a remote-controlled flyable camera, and the winner of the US $500,000 prize. Each of the second through tenth place winners took home US $50,000.

In second place was Open Bionics' 3D printed, functioning prosthetic robotic hand.

Third place was won by Team Proglove's "smart glove" for production and manufacturing. It is a sensor-based "smart glove" that can boost productivity for manufacturing jobs. With an embedded Intel Edison module, and an on-board display, ProGlove allows wearers to scan, sense, and record activities.

Hand Held Super Computer

ASCI Red supercomputer, the first computer capable of doing one trillion calculations per second. Now Intel says that it can put the processing power of ASCI Red in the palm of your hand. Literally.

Intel does this with a new chip, code-named Knights Corner. It crams more than 50 general-purpose Pentium microprocessor cores onto a single chip. All by itself, Knights Corner can perform about 1 trillion mathematical calculations per second. In 1996, it took 72 cabinets of servers for ASCI Red to pull off the same feat.

In June 2011, 17 of the world’s top 500 supercomputers used these graphical processing units, but now that number has jumped to 39

Intel is building a massive 10 petaflop (10 thousand trillion calculations per second) supercomputer called Stampede, out of these next-generation Intel chips. It takes server cards that have a Xeon and Knights Corner processor and slides them into specially designed 7 inch tall server boxes. They expect to get 8 petaflops of performance from the Knights Corner chips and another 2 from the Xeons when Stampede goes live. The 4U servers hold just one card now, but they are designed to eventually hold two, which means Stampede could double its power.

When it goes online in January 2013, Stampede will have 10,000 times the processing power of ASCI Red. As Tim Allen used to say, "Arrrgh, More Power!" Isn't technology wonderful!

New Intel Computer Chips

Intel's new computer chips are 32nanometers. Compared to Intel’s first microprocessor, introduced in 1971, a 32nm CPU runs over 4000 times as fast and each transistor uses about 4000 times less energy.
 The price per transistor has dropped by a factor of about 100,000.
  If you walked a billion steps, you would go around the earth 20 times.
 The original transistor built by Bell Labs in 1947 was so large it was put together by hand.
 More than 60 million 32nm transistors can fit on the head of a pin.
 More than 4 million 32nm transistors can fit in the period at the end of this sentence.
 A 32nm transistor contains gates that are so small, you can fit 3,000 of them across the width of a human hair.
 A 32nm transistor can switch on and off over 300 billion times in one second. It would take you 4000 years to flick a light switch on and off that many times.

I Know What You Are Thinking

Intel Corp. has introduced software that analyzes functional MRI scans to determine what parts of a person's brain are being activated as he or she thinks. it has 90 percent accuracy in guesses about which of two words a person was thinking about. Eventually, the technology could help the severely physically disabled to communicate.

The system works best when a person is first scanned while thinking of dozens of different concrete nouns - words like "bear" or "hammer." When test subjects are then asked to pick one of two new terms and think about it, the software uses the earlier results as a baseline to determine what the person is thinking. Very cool stuff.