6 ms·

Transistor Production Has Reached Astronomical Scales (2015)

81 points by mtrn 10y ago

projektfu 10y ago
One transistor for each bacterium in every person's gut.
mtrn 10y ago
If we are currently at 35B transistors per person on earth produced per year, back-of-the-envelope calculated, in 2025, we will probably have 200B transistors per person running on this planet. Or about two DGX-1 for every single human.
Koshkin 10y ago
The number given in the article is really not that big considering that most of these transistors are made as part of integrated circuits rather than in the form of discrete components. A modern large-scale integrated circuit can easily contain more than a few million transistors each.
- tasty_freeze 10y ago
  You are off by a factor of 1000. Top end CPUs and GPUs are in the billions of transistors. I believe 8Gb DRAMs are shipping commercially now (so 8G transistors and then some)
  - Koshkin 10y ago
    Sure, but this only supports a simple point I tried to make. Let me try again: today transistors are so small and appear in such large quantities as part of large-scale integrated circuits that counting them is almost like counting molecules (or, let's say, bacteria, as one commenter has pointed out earlier). Such "astronomical scales" make for catchy headlines, but that's about it. (Not a very interesting observation on my part, I admit.)
themgt 10y ago
> More transistors were made in 2014 than in all the years prior to 2011. That is an incredible bumper-sticker factoid. Does that pace keep up, that in any given year N we're manufacturing as many transistors as year(0 .. N-4) combined?
- akuma73 10y ago
  That's how exponential work. There is an end to it and it's not far off. Exponential transistor scaling (Moore's Law) has ended.
  - kabdib 10y ago
    Is that really true? We're probably done in 2D, but memory devices (flash) have been scaling vertically. Of course, you have to lay them out 2D, one layer at a time. And power density is still a problem with circuitry used for computation.
    - wtallis 10y ago
      NAND flash memory is scaling vertically at the moment, but not exponentially, and not for long. Within one or two doublings of the current layer count we'll be at the limit of what can be achieved without making further sacrifices of horizontal density, or going back to the drawing board on how 3D NAND is done. This is because 3D NAND is not manufactured like 2D NAND layers stacked one at a time. The features that run through the whole stack are hitting aspect ratios in excess of 50:1, and that can't be stretched too much further.
      - petra 10y ago
        3D logic circuits don't suffer from an high aspect ratio , but according to data by Zvi Orbach, after 4 layers the ecnomic benefit almost stops.
- dingo_bat 10y ago
  > Every second of that year, on average, 8 trillion transistors were produced. Literally unable to imagine these numbers.
a-no-n 10y ago
TL;DR - humans are f'd* *maybe, if not wise/able to constrain AI Non-humans maybe (t/quad)rillionaires to eclipse us within our lifetimes because of the likelihood of runaway technological acceleration. At the 1e9m systematic level, inorganic and hybrid sentient, self-replicating, self-improving systems seem an inevitable stage enabled by organic life.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  To be fair, we're fucked if left to our own devices; maybe creating a new form of life wouldn't be the worst thing we could do on the way out.
  - a-no-n 10y ago
    Not necessarily. Japan recovered from nearly deforestation a-la Easter Island. Penalties and enforcement are required to prevent consequences of individual and collective externalities.
- umanwizard 10y ago
  Just because transistor production has been exponential over some number of years in no way means it will be exponential forever.
- ars 10y ago
  What AI? There is no AI at present, and no known way of making one. The "AI" we have now is all specialized to a single field, there are none that can generalize like humans - or even animals. Just large numbers should not concern you - there are far more bacteria than transistors.
umanwizard 10y ago
10^20 billionths of $1 is a hundred billion dollars. So transistors cost 100 billion each in 1955?
- hatsunearu 10y ago
  Isn't the black axis the axis for the black line?
  - umanwizard 10y ago
    Yep. I was sure I must be missing something. Thanks for pointing it out.
  - 100ideas 10y ago
    This chart is poorly implemented. TLDR: The chart attempts to show the relationship between Transistors Produces per Year and Transistor Cost per Year, but confuses the relationship by denoting the latter quantity in units that require mental multiplication to understand (transistor per $1.0 * $0.000000001) --- I see two curves, red ("Transistors Made Per Year") and black (Price Per Transistor (Billionths of $1)), both plotted versus a common range - "years," - with plot-lines horizontally and vertically to help me trace points on the curve to their respective values. Thank you, authors, for providing labels for the horizontal scale-lines on the graph (the vertical axes). You've understood that I might want to understand the relationship between different pairings of points between the red and black curves, and the horizontal lines help me rapidly estimate y-values for both. Or at least for the left-side y-axis (the red curve): "Transistors Made Per Year." To be honest, I'm having difficulty relating the the quantities denoted in the units of the right-hand y-axis (the black curve), "Price Per Transistor (Billionths of $1)," with both the red curve AND the x-axis. Here's why: I had trouble efficiently internalizing what the units of the black curve - "Price Per Transistor (Billionths of $1)" - really meant. I am lazy, so I only figured it out on the third paragraph of my comment. I kept glancing at the red curve, then the black curve and thinking something like "ok... in 1965 it looks like the red curve was about 10^9 "Transistors made that year"... and for the black curve, it was $10 Billion per Transistor... oh wait. I mean ($10 Billion * $0.000000001) per Transistor. So I guess thats.... uh... $10/Transistor($1)? I.e. each transistor cost $10 and $10 billion were made total that year (ah ha, for a total silicon market cap of $10/transistor * 10,000,000,000 transistor = $100B). Please don't make us do math to understand the units of one of the axis, if possible. Also, labels to denote the values of the vertical gridlines (ticks on the x-axis) would have been helpful. Without them, we have to mentally estimate their value by subtracting the high-side of the domain from the low-side, then dividing by the number of tick marks (alternatively, counting from 0 the number of vertical lines across the whole graph. In this case: (2014 - 1955)/(11 tick marks + 1) = 4.9266666... years ~5 years. That said, I'm pleased to see more transistors were manufactured in the last year than there are stars in several galaxies! Wow. But Kanye won't be impressed until the number exceeds the number of all KNOWN STARS in the UNIVERSE. So keep at it. Lastly... Isn't VLSI so 80's? Isn't there a VLSIVLSI now or something? Maybe VLSI^2?
sytelus 10y ago
Interestingly, the number of transistors made on entire planet is now comparable to number of DNA base pairs created in a single human body.
- totalZero 10y ago
  Maybe this is how life forms are created.
  - jaredhansen 10y ago
    ... life forms? Oh you mean these life forms![1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT_Q_iAnmys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT_Q_iAnmys

81 points by mtrn 10y ago

One transistor for each bacterium in every person's gut.

mtrn 10y ago

If we are currently at 35B transistors per person on earth produced per year, back-of-the-envelope calculated, in 2025, we will probably have 200B transistors per person running on this planet. Or about two DGX-1 for every single human.

Koshkin 10y ago

The number given in the article is really not that big considering that most of these transistors are made as part of integrated circuits rather than in the form of discrete components. A modern large-scale integrated circuit can easily contain more than a few million transistors each.

tasty_freeze 10y ago
You are off by a factor of 1000. Top end CPUs and GPUs are in the billions of transistors. I believe 8Gb DRAMs are shipping commercially now (so 8G transistors and then some)
- Koshkin 10y ago
  Sure, but this only supports a simple point I tried to make. Let me try again: today transistors are so small and appear in such large quantities as part of large-scale integrated circuits that counting them is almost like counting molecules (or, let's say, bacteria, as one commenter has pointed out earlier). Such "astronomical scales" make for catchy headlines, but that's about it. (Not a very interesting observation on my part, I admit.)

themgt 10y ago

> More transistors were made in 2014 than in all the years prior to 2011. That is an incredible bumper-sticker factoid. Does that pace keep up, that in any given year N we're manufacturing as many transistors as year(0 .. N-4) combined?

akuma73 10y ago
That's how exponential work. There is an end to it and it's not far off. Exponential transistor scaling (Moore's Law) has ended.
- kabdib 10y ago
  Is that really true? We're probably done in 2D, but memory devices (flash) have been scaling vertically. Of course, you have to lay them out 2D, one layer at a time. And power density is still a problem with circuitry used for computation.
  - wtallis 10y ago
    NAND flash memory is scaling vertically at the moment, but not exponentially, and not for long. Within one or two doublings of the current layer count we'll be at the limit of what can be achieved without making further sacrifices of horizontal density, or going back to the drawing board on how 3D NAND is done. This is because 3D NAND is not manufactured like 2D NAND layers stacked one at a time. The features that run through the whole stack are hitting aspect ratios in excess of 50:1, and that can't be stretched too much further.
    - petra 10y ago
      3D logic circuits don't suffer from an high aspect ratio , but according to data by Zvi Orbach, after 4 layers the ecnomic benefit almost stops.
dingo_bat 10y ago
> Every second of that year, on average, 8 trillion transistors were produced. Literally unable to imagine these numbers.

a-no-n 10y ago

TL;DR - humans are f'd* *maybe, if not wise/able to constrain AI Non-humans maybe (t/quad)rillionaires to eclipse us within our lifetimes because of the likelihood of runaway technological acceleration. At the 1e9m systematic level, inorganic and hybrid sentient, self-replicating, self-improving systems seem an inevitable stage enabled by organic life.

M_Grey 10y ago
To be fair, we're fucked if left to our own devices; maybe creating a new form of life wouldn't be the worst thing we could do on the way out.
- a-no-n 10y ago
  Not necessarily. Japan recovered from nearly deforestation a-la Easter Island. Penalties and enforcement are required to prevent consequences of individual and collective externalities.
umanwizard 10y ago
Just because transistor production has been exponential over some number of years in no way means it will be exponential forever.
ars 10y ago
What AI? There is no AI at present, and no known way of making one. The "AI" we have now is all specialized to a single field, there are none that can generalize like humans - or even animals. Just large numbers should not concern you - there are far more bacteria than transistors.

umanwizard 10y ago

10^20 billionths of $1 is a hundred billion dollars. So transistors cost 100 billion each in 1955?

hatsunearu 10y ago
Isn't the black axis the axis for the black line?
- umanwizard 10y ago
  Yep. I was sure I must be missing something. Thanks for pointing it out.
- 100ideas 10y ago
  This chart is poorly implemented. TLDR: The chart attempts to show the relationship between Transistors Produces per Year and Transistor Cost per Year, but confuses the relationship by denoting the latter quantity in units that require mental multiplication to understand (transistor per $1.0 * $0.000000001) --- I see two curves, red ("Transistors Made Per Year") and black (Price Per Transistor (Billionths of $1)), both plotted versus a common range - "years," - with plot-lines horizontally and vertically to help me trace points on the curve to their respective values. Thank you, authors, for providing labels for the horizontal scale-lines on the graph (the vertical axes). You've understood that I might want to understand the relationship between different pairings of points between the red and black curves, and the horizontal lines help me rapidly estimate y-values for both. Or at least for the left-side y-axis (the red curve): "Transistors Made Per Year." To be honest, I'm having difficulty relating the the quantities denoted in the units of the right-hand y-axis (the black curve), "Price Per Transistor (Billionths of $1)," with both the red curve AND the x-axis. Here's why: I had trouble efficiently internalizing what the units of the black curve - "Price Per Transistor (Billionths of $1)" - really meant. I am lazy, so I only figured it out on the third paragraph of my comment. I kept glancing at the red curve, then the black curve and thinking something like "ok... in 1965 it looks like the red curve was about 10^9 "Transistors made that year"... and for the black curve, it was $10 Billion per Transistor... oh wait. I mean ($10 Billion * $0.000000001) per Transistor. So I guess thats.... uh... $10/Transistor($1)? I.e. each transistor cost $10 and $10 billion were made total that year (ah ha, for a total silicon market cap of $10/transistor * 10,000,000,000 transistor = $100B). Please don't make us do math to understand the units of one of the axis, if possible. Also, labels to denote the values of the vertical gridlines (ticks on the x-axis) would have been helpful. Without them, we have to mentally estimate their value by subtracting the high-side of the domain from the low-side, then dividing by the number of tick marks (alternatively, counting from 0 the number of vertical lines across the whole graph. In this case: (2014 - 1955)/(11 tick marks + 1) = 4.9266666... years ~5 years. That said, I'm pleased to see more transistors were manufactured in the last year than there are stars in several galaxies! Wow. But Kanye won't be impressed until the number exceeds the number of all KNOWN STARS in the UNIVERSE. So keep at it. Lastly... Isn't VLSI so 80's? Isn't there a VLSIVLSI now or something? Maybe VLSI^2?

sytelus 10y ago

Interestingly, the number of transistors made on entire planet is now comparable to number of DNA base pairs created in a single human body.

totalZero 10y ago
Maybe this is how life forms are created.
- jaredhansen 10y ago
  ... life forms? Oh you mean these life forms![1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT_Q_iAnmys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT_Q_iAnmys