Okay I've done some thinking/browsing and I've come up with an approximate way to figure out (edit: relative) Moore's law progress without relying on official t

Okay I've done some thinking/browsing and I've come up with an approximate way to figure out (edit: relative) Moore's law progress without relying on official transistor count by Intel: 1 - Take this Haswell image (Intel claim: 2.6 billion in 355 mm2): http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8426/HSW-E%20Die%20Mapping%20Hi-Res.jpg http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8426/HSW-E%20Die%20Mapping%... (source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-review-core-i7-5960x-i7-5930k-i7-5820k-tested http://www.anandtech.com/show/8426/the-intel-haswell-e-cpu-r...) 2 - Take this Prescott 2M image (Intel claim: 169 million in 135 mm2): http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/pentium4/6xx/prescott2m.jpg http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/pentium4/6xx/p... (source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/1621/3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/1621/3) 3 - Process these images: remove extra text and resize one so that the ratio of the areas of the two dies is 355 to 135. 4 - Extract one core from Haswell (e.g., top left one) 5 - Remove the per-core cache (e.g., top left square in the top left core) 6 - Estimate the area of the resulting core. 7 - For Prescott, remove the visible left side (which is L2 cache) 8 - Remove about 30% from the top, likely overhead of the Netburst architecture (not present in the Haswell core) (you might disagree with this step in which case, you can do the calculation without removing it as well) 9 - Estimate the area of this. 10 - The number in step 6 (area-6) should be smaller than in step 9 (area-9) and would represent the true shrinkage over 4 technology nodes. 11 - area-9 divided by area-6 is the percentage of transistor-count-increase over 4 nodes. This wouldn't give absolute numbers and won't corroborate Intel's quotes for either Haswell or Prescott. But it will give the ratio which can be compared with the claim of going from 90nm to 22nm, i.e., 4 generations, over 8 years. According to which the percentage in step 11 should be 2^4 = 16 = 1600% (My guess: it would be way less than 1600%) even ignoring the fact that the time difference between two articles is 9.5 years instead of 8. (P.S.: I don't have time atm but I'll try to do this myself)