5 ms·

It is hard to imagine the scale of these things, I know if you had tapped me on the shoulder at Intel in the 80's and said, "in 40 years, the chip your looking

It is hard to imagine the scale of these things, I know if you had tapped me on the shoulder at Intel in the 80's and said, "in 40 years, the chip your looking at will fit in a couple of square mm of silicon." I would not have believed you. Of course it doesn't "really" fit in that small a slice as you need to get the signals into and out of it and those points take space, but it is doesn't take much space.

eigenvalue 4y ago
But didn't you intellectually know that this would be the implication of Moore's law if it could actually hold over such a long period? Maybe it's more a manifestation of how counterintuitive exponential growth is to human sensibilities.
- ChuckMcM 4y ago
  To be fair I took way too much math to be comfortable in my college days but when at Intel everyone (even Gordon) knew that "Moore's Law" wasn't a "law" (like the Law of Gravity) it was an observation on the current state of the art. As a result everyone made the assumption that semiconductor scaling was an S curve and we happened to be in the exponential part of that curve but it would taper off. And everyone in the design engineering team felt it would taper off way sooner than it has!
  - aswanson 4y ago
    Was it common knowledge back then that CMOS would eventually deprecate TTL, ECL, etc?
    - ChuckMcM 4y ago
      Yes. Process changes, transistor geometry, dielectric materials, were all things that people expected to change. That customers would stop using TTL was pretty avant-garde, but when ASICS became "affordable" (basically custom chips for non-chip companies) it was obvious that volume manufacturers would condense a bunch of TTL into a single package just for cost reasons. But fundamentally electrons and 'charge' are quantum in nature and even in the 80's if you're transistors were "too close" you could get electron tunneling between them. So I, and others, assumed there was a really hard limit on how small you could go (and it was likely above 100nm rather than below it). And of course now hardly anyone used old 90nm tech, I think 40nm is the current "jelly bean" process but I freely admit I've not looked at the geometries used in the vast Chinese IC market of "support" chips.
alberth 4y ago
E.g. the Apple Watch is more powerful than all the computers that sent Apollo 11 to the moon.
- selectodude 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure the Apple Watch has more computing power than desktop computers from 15 years ago.
  - nomel 4y ago
    I tried to look up these numbers, but, understandably, I'm having trouble finding Apple Watch benchmarks. It looks like first gen Apple Watch (2016) had around 3GF [1], where P4 had around 12GF, so stretch that 15 to 20, and it could be in a reasonable ballpark. 1. https://www.mouser.com/blog/stunning-increases-in-processing-explained-for-normal-humans https://www.mouser.com/blog/stunning-increases-in-processing...
    - deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- liamwire 4y ago
  In that example, we may as well compare a thermonuclear weapon to a conventional one—the scales are gargantuan. In my opinion a more apt comparison might be the TI-84 calculator, which was ~350x faster than the computers used in Apollo.
correlator 4y ago
Feynman gave a lot of talks about the natural limits of information storage, but knowing the theory and seeing it done in practice are two different animals!
bjourne 4y ago
To be fair, the 80286 introduced in 1982 fits in 47mm^2 of silicon. Chips haven't shrunk that much but gotten immensely more powerful instead.
klelatti 4y ago
I did a rough calculation a few days ago which roughly indicated that you could now get 300 complete 4004’s into the space occupied by a single 4004 transistor in 1971. (I may have got that wrong so happy to be corrected!)
- tails4e 4y ago
  Wifh 134k transistors and 49mm2, that's 365um2 per transitor. The N3 node from TSMC is quoted as ~300Mtr/mm2, so I believe 365um2 is 109k transtors, so I guess it means just under one 4004 could fit in the area of a single 1982 transitor. That said the Mtr/mm2 number is not the whole story, often single gates like an inverter could be made of many transistor, fingers, dummy gates, etc, so the effective number is lower. Would be interesting to see how many inv/nand/FF/SRAM was in the 4004, as it would be easier to get a fair comparison. What calc did you have?
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  - ido 4y ago
    The 4004 only has 2300 transistors, not 134k.
  - d_tr 4y ago
    You got the wrong numbers for the 4004! The 4004 had just 2300 transistors in a 12 mm^2 area. So, today you can fit 3*10^8 * 12 = 3.6*10^9 transistors in that area, or 1.5 million 4004s, or 650 4004s in the area of the old transistor.
    - klelatti 4y ago
      Thanks - this was my calculation but with, I think, one generation older node density - hence the approx 2x factor difference.
    - tails4e 4y ago
      Thanks for the correction, I was looking at the 286, not the 4004! Not sure how I managed to get the wrong chip... Though someone mentioned the 286 in a comment below, so I guess I muddled that in.
7speter 4y ago
A chip from the 80s fitting into a couple of square mm’s? Maybe a single square mm, or a few hundred square nms, no?

eigenvalue 4y ago

But didn't you intellectually know that this would be the implication of Moore's law if it could actually hold over such a long period? Maybe it's more a manifestation of how counterintuitive exponential growth is to human sensibilities.

ChuckMcM 4y ago
To be fair I took way too much math to be comfortable in my college days but when at Intel everyone (even Gordon) knew that "Moore's Law" wasn't a "law" (like the Law of Gravity) it was an observation on the current state of the art. As a result everyone made the assumption that semiconductor scaling was an S curve and we happened to be in the exponential part of that curve but it would taper off. And everyone in the design engineering team felt it would taper off way sooner than it has!
- aswanson 4y ago
  Was it common knowledge back then that CMOS would eventually deprecate TTL, ECL, etc?
  - ChuckMcM 4y ago
    Yes. Process changes, transistor geometry, dielectric materials, were all things that people expected to change. That customers would stop using TTL was pretty avant-garde, but when ASICS became "affordable" (basically custom chips for non-chip companies) it was obvious that volume manufacturers would condense a bunch of TTL into a single package just for cost reasons. But fundamentally electrons and 'charge' are quantum in nature and even in the 80's if you're transistors were "too close" you could get electron tunneling between them. So I, and others, assumed there was a really hard limit on how small you could go (and it was likely above 100nm rather than below it). And of course now hardly anyone used old 90nm tech, I think 40nm is the current "jelly bean" process but I freely admit I've not looked at the geometries used in the vast Chinese IC market of "support" chips.

alberth 4y ago

E.g. the Apple Watch is more powerful than all the computers that sent Apollo 11 to the moon.

selectodude 4y ago
I'm pretty sure the Apple Watch has more computing power than desktop computers from 15 years ago.
- nomel 4y ago
  I tried to look up these numbers, but, understandably, I'm having trouble finding Apple Watch benchmarks. It looks like first gen Apple Watch (2016) had around 3GF [1], where P4 had around 12GF, so stretch that 15 to 20, and it could be in a reasonable ballpark. 1. https://www.mouser.com/blog/stunning-increases-in-processing-explained-for-normal-humans https://www.mouser.com/blog/stunning-increases-in-processing...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
liamwire 4y ago
In that example, we may as well compare a thermonuclear weapon to a conventional one—the scales are gargantuan. In my opinion a more apt comparison might be the TI-84 calculator, which was ~350x faster than the computers used in Apollo.

correlator 4y ago

Feynman gave a lot of talks about the natural limits of information storage, but knowing the theory and seeing it done in practice are two different animals!

bjourne 4y ago

To be fair, the 80286 introduced in 1982 fits in 47mm^2 of silicon. Chips haven't shrunk that much but gotten immensely more powerful instead.

klelatti 4y ago

I did a rough calculation a few days ago which roughly indicated that you could now get 300 complete 4004’s into the space occupied by a single 4004 transistor in 1971. (I may have got that wrong so happy to be corrected!)

tails4e 4y ago
Wifh 134k transistors and 49mm2, that's 365um2 per transitor. The N3 node from TSMC is quoted as ~300Mtr/mm2, so I believe 365um2 is 109k transtors, so I guess it means just under one 4004 could fit in the area of a single 1982 transitor. That said the Mtr/mm2 number is not the whole story, often single gates like an inverter could be made of many transistor, fingers, dummy gates, etc, so the effective number is lower. Would be interesting to see how many inv/nand/FF/SRAM was in the 4004, as it would be easier to get a fair comparison. What calc did you have?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ido 4y ago
  The 4004 only has 2300 transistors, not 134k.
- d_tr 4y ago
  You got the wrong numbers for the 4004! The 4004 had just 2300 transistors in a 12 mm^2 area. So, today you can fit 3*10^8 * 12 = 3.6*10^9 transistors in that area, or 1.5 million 4004s, or 650 4004s in the area of the old transistor.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    Thanks - this was my calculation but with, I think, one generation older node density - hence the approx 2x factor difference.
  - tails4e 4y ago
    Thanks for the correction, I was looking at the 286, not the 4004! Not sure how I managed to get the wrong chip... Though someone mentioned the 286 in a comment below, so I guess I muddled that in.

7speter 4y ago

A chip from the 80s fitting into a couple of square mm’s? Maybe a single square mm, or a few hundred square nms, no?