14 ms·
How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?
- zaps 3y ago[flagged]
- htk 3y agoI consider myself very lucky to be born in this age of civilization where technology increases at such incredible pace. Playing games on an atari in my childhood, then sega master system, nintendo, snes, pc games, the first 3d acceleration consumer cards, all the way to having a supercomputer in my pocket. What a time to be alive.
- Mistletoe 3y agoUnfortunately this hasn’t resulted in people being more happy. It’s quite the paradox. What are we doing all this for? https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-n... I don’t post that to be negative, because I agree with what you are saying about a unique time to be alive and have done the same Atari to Xbox Series X glow-up and I marvel at the improvements there. But I do think happiness (and decreased mortality, increased lifespan) should be the ultimate end goal we are striving for for humanity and we seem to be failing, at least in the USA. The reasons are certainly multifaceted, but increased transistor density may be one of the reasons just like obesity, environmental toxins, etc.
- willis936 3y agoSecurity. Nature owes nothing to anything. Even the warmest bosom in the cosmos (Earth) is hostile, temperamental, and temporary. If the death of one individual is a tragedy then I don't know the right word to describe the termination of life.
- justinator 3y agoOr the false sense of security.
- willis936 3y agoWhat is false about it? Are you arguing that we are less secure against nature while sitting in climate controlled buildings with food stores in them, and a global industrial complex raised to keep these trains running?
- justinator 3y agoI have never lived in a world where there was not the existential threat of nuclear annihilation in every minute of every hour of every day of my life. But you're right: I'm not going to get lost in my own city - or yours - because I have an iPhone in my pocket. I may never really learn my city and all its hidden little secrets you find only by wandering around, but I'll be efficient getting to the bar in a "climate controlled buildings" where I'll just stare at the iPhone some more and not really talk to anyone, as that's what everyone is doing, too. "It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress - but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful ... Whatever does not lend itself to being bought or sold ... is debarred" –Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
- wiseowise 3y ago> but I'll be efficient getting to the bar in a "climate controlled buildings" where I'll just stare at the iPhone some more and not really talk to anyone, as that's what everyone is doing, too. Sometimes I wonder if internet people are living in parallel universe. I see literally opposite, wherever I go, of what people like you describe.
- justinator 3y agoWell you're spending your Sunday staring at a screen on a venture capitalist's message board, having contributed nine comments in the last 24 hours. Where are you right now, exactly?
- Etheryte 3y agoLeaving aside issues caused by social media etc, this always seems like an odd take to me. Why do you expect technology to make people happier? I mean, cars have gotten drastically better since their inception, but I don't really expect my car to make me happy, much like I don't expect the insulation of my house to make me happy, or the x-ray machine my doc uses to make my life a happy one. I think technological development is a completely separate axis to happiness, you can be technologically stagnant and happy or advancing and happy, you can be standing still and sad and moving forwards and sad.
- accrual 3y ago> I don't really expect my car to make me happy, much like I don't expect the insulation of my house to make me happy, or the x-ray machine my doc uses to make my life a happy one I think this is valid for most people. But as I've tried to integrate more gratitude into my life, I've noticed that it is possible to feel happiness from these things. I find it all too easy to disregard many of the things I have because they've always been there and available. But as soon as I don't have some of my comforts (being outside in the cold, camping and batteries are dying, my car needs an unexpected repair, a pain in my arm that I can't treat myself, etc.), it becomes easier to realize just now nice things really are.
- st-keller 3y agoIs it really happyness we should strive for? I hear this over and over without anyone challenging this. Maybe a meaningful live is more fulfilling than a happy one? If i remember Nitzsche correctly: „No one strives for happiness - only the englishman does!“
- jprete 3y agoI don’t think tech comes out better on this scale than the happiness one.
- amelius 3y agoPerhaps people are happy when they are using their tech, but in normal life they feel depressed.
- thatguysaguy 3y ago[dead]
- moh_maya 3y agoAt some level, I think this is orthogonal to technological progress. One possible way of getting at this is to ask if people were more ‘happy’ when there wasn’t this level of tech available - and I’m not sure the answer is yes - I mean, there’s the mythos of ‘a simple life’ and ‘noble savages’, but from what I’ve read of life even a 100 years back - I would surmise folks were as unhappy / miserable then too - but likely for different reasons. I think expecting just tech to make us happy is framing the wrong problem space.
- agumonkey 3y agobut existence influences choices so technological progress in itself, regardless of its use, is a consideration
- edgyquant 3y agoMaybe happy isn’t the right word, but I think it’s pretty clear people were more content and felt a sense of purpose. Social media has made things worse, but it’s really the loss of community and religion that has led to the crisis of loneliness and depression among todays people.
- eropple 3y ago> I think it’s pretty clear people were more content and felt a sense of purpose From what available data would you derive this and not immediately question selection bias?
- pests 3y ago> but I think it’s pretty clear [...] Is it? Because that is not clear to me in the slightest.
- jwells89 3y agoModern loneliness is a far more multifaceted issue than it’s often presented as. For instance I’m sure that a major factor is the need for people to move great distances away from family and the community they grew up in to be able to find education, living wages, and other forms of opportunity. That breaks existing connections and makes it harder to form new ones, but I never see that talked about.
- docfort 3y agoBread is a great invention and a staple for many across the world. People have grown better at the process of developing grass into ever more productive wheat crops, transforming the inedible into something people find comfort in. But yes, there’s also an element of bread and circuses. Technology is not enough. It is not orthogonal to happiness, as you point out, but having the best bread doesn’t fundamentally make the course of humanity better. That begins and ends with what we individually and collectively choose: technology merely enhances our will.
- calvinmorrison 3y agoSome technology does and some doesn't. A washing machine is a fantastic piece of machinery you could even build on a small scale that saves hard labor A patent by Sony that forces the TV viewer to stand up and lift their hands and say "McDonalds!" to continue watching TV, is not
- agumonkey 3y agoI think there's reverted or diminishing returns.. a 400MHz svga was generational, now a prosumer pocket supercalculator quickly goes meh, very odd to observe
- downWidOutaFite 3y agoThe book Sapiens argues that tech has made us less happy ever since the invention of farming 10,000 years ago, the hunter gatherers were happier and healthier than the farm villagers. But since tech allows the population density to grow we get stuck in "the luxury trap", we can't go backwards or a bunch of people will die. And the unhappier larger village is more powerful than the hunter gatherers so they have an evolutionary advantage. I think you could apply a similar theory to the modern capitalist world.
- gary_0 3y agoOn the one hand, I love the idea of living a slower-paced, less competitive life. Most humans ending up crammed into urban rat-races is a horrible outcome. On the other hand, I like not dying in agony of easily treatable diseases. I like that the vast majority of people in developed countries have zero chance of dying of malnutrition. Having to choose between one or the other would suck. I wonder if we can have both?
- pests 3y agoNothing is stopping you from living a slower-paced, less competitive life right now, today. While still getting all the benefits of society being advanced enough to not die in agony of easily treatable diseases.
- vachina 3y agoI cannot sleep well at night knowing my neighbor just upgraded his Porsche.
- wiseowise 3y ago> healthier than the farm villagers. I would like to see some data comparing modern, fit worker against average hunter gatherer.
- bobsmooth 3y agoIdk man, air conditioning makes me very happy.
- FredPret 3y agoWhat does happiness have to do with material progress? There are happy monks and unhappy billionaires. Humanity must push forward on all fronts.
- robertlagrant 3y agoHappiness is relative. Paris Hilton might feel distraught if her credit card is declined, if that's the worst thing that's ever happened to her. That's why it's important to understand context, both local and historical, to understand our place in the world and how we should feel about it.
- n3150n 3y agoReminded me of this great literary article I read not too long ago, detailing some of the story behind the TMSC factory of semiconductors. Truly a marvelous read, if you are interested. https://www.wired.com/story/i-saw-the-face-of-god-in-a-tsmc-factory/ https://www.wired.com/story/i-saw-the-face-of-god-in-a-tsmc-...
- scarface_74 3y agoI think it is more amazing that we went from the Wright brothers in 1903 to landing on the moon in 1969.
- samwillis 3y agoAnd we haven't been back in 50 years, despite all the incredible technology improvements. The Apollo guidance computers had "several tens of thousands of transistors"[0], we now have 19 billion in our pocket! 0: https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/apollo-11-mankind-and-moores-law/#:~:text=The%20two%20Apollo%20Guidance%20Computers,tens%20of%20thousands%20of%20transistors https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/apollo-11-mank....
- scarface_74 3y agoI think “For All Mankind” is a great “What If” show about what things would be like if we had kept pushing forward. The thing about the series though was that NASA was self funded and didn’t have to justify spending billions in taxpayer money. Also, do we really have better propulsion technology to make space travel more efficient?
- jacquesm 3y agoImagine if all of the worlds armament budgets were instead rerouted to science and space travel...
- Waterluvian 3y agoFor me it was the experience of being a teenager for both Half Life 1 and 2 and the brilliant and mad rush of GPU improvements in such a short amount of time.
- permo-w 3y agochange and power do not necessarily make one happy
- corethree 3y agoI think we're unlucky. I think the next generation or a couple generations down the line they will figure out biological immortality. If you're immortal the sum total of things you will see in your lifetime will dwarf the experience you're having now.
- huytersd 3y agoI agree. I feel like we missed immortality by a few decades to a hundred years at the most. We might be some of the last generations that actually have to die.
- ben_w 3y agoI don't know which generation you're in, but I do remember people saying in the late 00s, that the first person to live to 200 had likely already been born, we just didn't know how old they were.
- kaba0 3y agoAnd what will we do with immortality? Our organs will continue to deteriorate, especially the brain. Many older people are already quite gullible and easy to feed propaganda to, being a favored target to politicians, let alone someone 90+.
- ben_w 3y agoIf you think that's a necessary part of immortality, you're looking at fiction inspired by the ancient Greek tale of Eos and Tithonus and not, for example, SENS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_engineered_negligible_senescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_engineered_negl...
- corethree 3y agoThat deterioration is what eventually causes death so immortality involves removing said deterioration. I'm short Immortality is achieved by stopping aging.
- Daz1 3y agoCapitalism is amazing :)
- this15testing1 3y agoif you can willfully ignore exploitation and externalities
- olliej 3y agoI vaguely recall (many years ago) some GPU (a Matrox one iirc) coming out and it being a huge deal because of how many transistors it had. I think it may have been an amazing 100 million. Times have changed :D
- jeffbee 3y agoSub-micron lithography was also an inflection point in the discourse, even if it was an irrelevant threshold to physicists. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=submicron+lithography&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=submicron+lith...
- jdjdjdhhd 3y agoComputers used to evolve much more quickly... Or at least the improvements made a much bigger difference
- dehrmann 3y agoThe difference between 1990 and 2000 was astounding. 2000 and 2010 was ok. 2010 and 2020 was meh. Now, what computers did in the 90's, cell networks did from 2005 to 2015.
- holoduke 3y agoMoore is still alive. In 2030 we have an estimated one trillion transistors on a chip. We would need that for our ever increasing hunger for memory and processing power. 1TB model on your iphone 22 with 100 tokens per second.
- rzimmerman 3y agoWell technically he died in March, but the law holds true.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoMHz->GHz wars. This caused Intel and AMD to chase hyperdeep pipelines with terrible stall characteristics and awful cycle efficiencies. You're misremembering. Matrox cards were also terribly slow in DOS and anything adjacent to 3D. I own several models with SGRAM. Even GeForce 2 GTS: 25m transistors. G200: 10m. Voodoo2: 4m.
- throwaway4good 3y agoIn terms of usefulness and end user experience, I find no difference between the iPhone X (A11, 4 billion transistors) and my current 14. Seems to me that all that extra processing power is still looking for a use case.
- jwells89 3y agoFor me there’s some benefit in little things like on-device OCR and image classification, which has been helpful for quickly surfacing particular photos in my library but yes the broad strokes have not changed much.
- throwaway4good 3y agoI am wondering about this; I have noticed the OCR (that you can photo something and the copy the text as plain text). How compute sensitive is that? Is that not available on the X? It is a useful feature. In particular in Google translate (lens function) which I am pretty was also there on the X (perhaps requiring a trip to Google’s server).
- jwells89 3y agoI’m not sure if it’s available on the X or not, but it would make a lot of sense if a certain level of hardware acceleration is required to do this OCR in the background with little to no negative impact on battery life. The X’s SoC can probably handle one-offs just fine, but it might not hold up as well to the OS churning through photos OCRing them in the background.
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- jeffbee 3y agoEven if you didn't change anything about the software, the newer CPUs would still give you better energy efficiency and thereby longer battery life.
- test77777 3y agoIt’s funny, but you’d figure as sophisticated as the manufacturering standards are they could give an exact number. Or couldn’t they?
- kylec 3y agoI'm sure the chip designers at Apple know the exact number, but that doesn't mean Apple's going to share it
- gpm 3y agoI wonder if they even do. I'm sure they could theoretically compute it... but is it something that is ever actually computed? It seems sort of like asking a programmer how many instructions there are in a binary we maintain. We could find out if we decided it mattered.
- sweetjuly 3y agoIt's a one liner in Virtuoso (hard IPs aside). I doubt anyone memorized the exact number but it's definitely not some unknown or hard to figure out quantity.
- dmitrygr 3y agoIn theory, the answer is computable, but it probably doesn’t mean what you think it does. A gigantic chunk of those transistors are just SRAM memory cells for various caches. The number of transistors used to actually implement the logic of the SoC is significantly smaller. I would be surprised if it was more than 5%. The growth of this number between generations is also likely not very large. Most of the growth is also probably cache sizes.
- corethree 3y agoI don't think it's as exacting as you think. They build redundant functionality into the chips to meet QA specs. They expect parts of the chip to fail. The point is that it meets the overall specs.
- mlsu 3y agoI've often struggled to really "grok" how complex chips are. They all kinda look the same. I write software, so I know how complex that is, but like the device itself -- it's this little black box. What's the difference between one little black box and another? Most people don't even get that far; they think the computer is the screen that lights up. I've been reading datasheets a lot at work. The datasheet for an STM32F4 is 149 pages long. The technical manual is over 800 pages long. That puts it into perspective a little bit better for me. I might spend days or weeks writing a driver for some little few pages of that datasheet. It's a dense 800 pages. Those manuals indicate just a fraction of the complexity that lies inside of the device -- they describe features that I can use, not even how those features are implemented or made. And that's for a tiny chip that costs a couple dollars. A billion is a tough number to understand, but I recommend reading a datasheet of a chip sometime. It will put into perspective how much complexity there is in just a few millions of transistors. I sometimes have to take a moment, because I remember descriptions of alien technology from sci-fi books. Complexity, opaqueness, power. Chips.
- 7373737373 3y agoThe Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manual Combined Volumes: 1, 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D, 3A, 3B, 3C, 3D, and 4 has over 5000 pages! [0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/intel-sdm.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
- penguin_booze 3y agoI'm out of date by a couple of years, but the last I knew, the ARM Architecture Reference Manual (amusingly, also called the ARM ARM) is around 8000 pages. Though, it carries similar corpus from the ARMv7 manual, now bottled as AArch32.
- raverbashing 3y agoSome people might be wondering "huh, why number them in this weird way?!" It's because they were originally 3 volumes. volume 2 is the ASM reference, 3 is the "how to do things" reference (System programming guide). Volume 1 is more of a general reference so maybe that's why it didn't grow so much.
- vinni2 3y agoDoesn’t seem to follow Moore’s law.
- bottlepalm 3y agoIt’s pretty frustrating having a locked supercomputer in your pocket. I just want to play some emulated games, PC games from the 90s, host a desktop experience from my phone, etc..
- tralarpa 3y agoCouldn't you run Windows 95 or 98 on DOSBox on your phone just for fun? (never tried myself, maybe there is something better than DOSBox for that)
- bottlepalm 3y agoYou have to jailbreak your phone which means many people don't even try porting things over to iOS in the first place. So much wasted potential.
- bullen 3y agoYes, but how many are doing the majority of the work, die heatmaps needed.
- timmaxw 3y agoWhat are all those transistors doing? I've heard the cache is the biggest part. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17, the A17 has 72MB of cache. Cache is typically SRAM. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_random-access_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_random-access_memory, a single bit of SRAM typically uses 6 transistors, but it could be anywhere from 4 to 10. So that's between 2.3B and 5.7B transistors for the cache. That leaves about 1B transistors for each of the 12 cores (6 CPU + 6 GPU). The instruction set is a few hundred instructions. Surely it doesn't take millions of transistors to implement each instruction. Other than the cache, which parts of the processor need millions of transistors?
- Shawnj2 3y agoApple has a bunch of device function hardware in the SOC like the SSD controller, the security chip, the GPU, the neural engine, etc. a decent amount of which probably uses hardware logic.
- patterns 3y agoRelated to this is I watched a fairly recent talk by David May who worked on the implemention of the transputer in the late 80s together with Tony Hoare: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lXUWmHgLiyU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lXUWmHgLiyU At the end of the talk, he mentions the staggering complexity of the design and manufacturing of chips with billions of transistors. We have long reached a point where nobody fully understands how the chips work. IIRC, only two companies can do the manufacturing. That modern chips work at all almost seems like a miracle. Do we really need chips this complex?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoIn 1985, I was in a lab at a mainframe manufacturer. It was a big room. I estimated that the room had one transistor for every man, woman, and child on the planet. (We didn't think about trans-tolerant vocabulary in those days.) Now here that is on one chip. That change blows my mind.
- sva_ 3y agoSeems like these numbers are very close to that of the Snapdragon[0] which of course makes sense, given technological progress. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
- t0bia_s 3y agoWould be nice to have same envolving curve for battery duration.