4 ms·

I love this kind of stuff. I’m always amazed about how small we can operate.

• kens 7y ago
  It's also amazing how much smaller transistors have become since 1978. The 76477 sound chip had about 200 transistors, and now chips have billions of transistors.
  • Kirby64 7y ago
    Obviously transistors have gotten way smaller, but it's not entirely fair to compare transistors in a sound chip to something in a microprocessor. Anything that's driving a speaker is going to have pretty large transistors. Additionally the power stage of chips generally takes up some room. It'd be a lot more comparable to compare similar basic sound output chips... I bet they don't have more than a few thousand transistors even today.
    • djmips 7y ago
      And yet this chip wasn't designed to drive a speaker. The reference designs I've seen show using external transistors to actually drive the speaker.
      • CamperBob2 7y ago
        There was the SN76488, if you wanted to drive a (small) speaker directly.