TIL there are approximately 13 sextillion transistors in existence
TIL there are approximately 13 sextillion transistors in existence
As a silicon wafer supplier, we sometimes wonder how many transistors there are in the world. Learn the answer in our latest blog.
That's more than your mom.
Invented December 23, 1947, therefore, on average, we made a danged lot of them every year since.
Would love to see a graph, the annual amount probably increased exponentially.
I would guess a doubling period of roughly every 12-24 months. Actually probably much shorter since that would be same number of chips/year.
And the average lifespan of a cat, listed on the cat article of wikipedia, is 13 years. Coincidence?
Sextillion: 10³⁶
Edit: look at sneezycats comment. 10²¹ it is.
It's actually 1021, short scale sextillions.
Oh. Thanks for the hint.
Wikipedia says: two different naming systems for integers powers of ten but they use the same name. TIL.
The archaeologists 1000 years from now are going to be so confused.
That's what they tell you to hide the bees.
I knew it! Just like how they used to tell us that the little men inside our CRT TVs was just an electron beam.
bow chicka bow bow
One iPhone has about 8 billion transistors in it, so makes sense
13 sextillion transistors is about 1625 billion transistors per human, though - or just over 200 iPhones' worth of transistors per person. That's still about an order of magnitude higher than I'd have guessed.
The numbers are totally off though.
A current-gen iPhone SoC (or CPU, the sources are not very clear), nhas about 19 billion transistors. That does not include transistors from flash memory. Following the numbers it does also not include RAM.
IPhone transistor count becomes completely irrelevant when you start looking at flash chips. Even a 16GB flash drive can contain 64 billion transistors.
A modern data center GPU has 100 billion or more, and think of all the infrastructure and household devices that have microchips in them as well
The only other thing I've heard of on the scale of sextillion is mole, a unit of measure for 602 sextillion particles in a quantity based on the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon 12
Does the transistors in CPUs and GPUs count?
I was about to say, between my PC, my laptop, my cell phone, my NAS, my printer, my wireless router, my ethernet switch, and all the SBCs and microcontrollers in my electronics kit, not to mention peripherals and accessories, I'm probably sitting within 2 meters of a trillion transistors.
How many are used to run Java?
There is a point on the scale at which a quantity of something stops making sense. Some sextillion transistors, billions of Java devices, and so on. I always found such statistics weird, as it is just too hard to imagine the numbers. It is far easier to rationalise logically.
The basis for digital computing, that has been aggressively miniaturised and multiplied for decades? Yes, I believe those would be absurdly abundant.
A programming language designed to be platform independent, around the dawn of portable computing? I am sure it must have found its way to a lot of devices.
what they just call me