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> Transistors "just" made it more efficient. Sort of, the thing about transistors isn't the efficiency as much as the scalability. You'd be very hard-pressed
by trelane 3y ago
> Transistors "just" made it more efficient.
Sort of, the thing about transistors isn't the efficiency as much as the scalability.
You'd be very hard-pressed to make a modern processor out of vacuum tubes. It would be enormous, tedious to build (couldn't use modern lithography), and also consume tons of power.
- almostnormal 3y ago> [...] tedious to build [...] It (or major parts of it at least) could be built by a fully automatic / robotized manufacturing plant. That isn't "tedious". Even for a one of its kind processor that would be much cheaper than the manual way.
- nostoc 3y ago> . It would be enormous, tedious to build (couldn't use modern lithography), and also consume tons of power. Sounds to me like you're saying that Transistors are more efficient than vacuum tubes, both in terms of space and power consumption.
- ben7799 3y agoMany orders of magnitude so. The last generations of vacuum tube processors were the size of large multi-story office buildings and had 50k tubes. Compare to your smartphone, it would take billions of tubes to duplicate it.
- Thetawaves 3y agoLater research into thermionic devices did produce miniaturized versions, but nothing close to the scale of silicon transistors today. If the same R&D might went into thermionics, we might just have devices of similar scales.
- fisf 3y agoYes. But at some point a quantitative difference becomes qualitativ.
- jjk166 3y agoIf you're simply using efficient as a synonym for better, then every improvement is tautologically more efficient than what it immediately replaces. But solid state transistors were pursued specifically for their reduced power consumption while their scalability, which at the time was an afterthought, wound up making them revolutionary.
- codedokode 3y agoTubes also burn out regularly (literally every day) when you have thousands of them.