3 ms·
to compare, ENIAC had 18,000 tubes and 1200 relays, and could perform 5000 additions, or 3 square roots per second. in 1956, when it was decommissioned. that w
by genewitch 2y ago
to compare, ENIAC had 18,000 tubes and 1200 relays, and could perform 5000 additions, or 3 square roots per second. in 1956, when it was decommissioned.
that was 80 years ago, for the military. So plotting that out, first actual PC was 25 years after ENIAC was decommissioned, the IBM PC 5150, with 29,000 transistors in the 8088. 12 years later, the 586 had 3.1mm transistors, P4 had 42mm, 10 years later (2003) p4xe had 169mm (but a year earlier there were only 65mm in the p4). haswell, ten years later, 1.4 billion transistors. in 2023, AMD ryzen 7800x3d had 6.5 billion transistors.
here's a graph i threw together to see what the trendline was https://i.imgur.com/4ofV7Xr.png https://i.imgur.com/4ofV7Xr.png
- staunton 2y agoSerious question: has such a calculation ever successfully predicted a technology trend? How much should we believe it and to what accuracy?
- genewitch 2y agoWell, i did this a few times between 2011-2016 and predicted SSD/NVME and spindle sizes through this year pretty accurately. Moore's "law" said the graph has a maximum angle, but i think most people think it implies a minimum angle. the graph i plotted is a lot less steep than Moore's law ought to imply, but these are all desktop CPUs - workstation/server CPUs are over 100 billion transistors already and are well within the constraints of Moore's law.