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.