"We can stick millions of bytes on an image, but hundreds of small transactions? Too difficult!" The transistors on an IC are like pixels on an image. Every in

"We can stick millions of bytes on an image, but hundreds of small transactions? Too difficult!" The transistors on an IC are like pixels on an image. Every individual component is a single transaction. Not surprisingly it's way cheaper to transfer an 1MB picture than 100 small requests that each have their own overhead. It's a difference between the processes they are made with. It would also be expensive to have hundreds of individual transistors. It's the fact that they live in the same packaging and are manufactured at the same moment into the silicon what makes them cheap.