Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!bu.edu!bu-cs!cs!art
From: art@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Moore's Law
Message-ID: <51916@bu.edu.bu.edu>
Date: 8 Feb 90 20:33:48 GMT
References: <51751@bu.edu.bu.edu> <3300099@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <3793@odin.SGI.COM>
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Reply-To: art@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson)
Organization: Boston University
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In article <3793@odin.SGI.COM> pkr@maddog.sgi.com (Phil Ronzone) writes:
|In article <3300099@m.cs.uiuc.edu> nelson@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
|>
|>Something here seems a bit flaky...  If, in fact, that doubling every 10
|>  months rule holds back to 1960, and we assume that there was only ONE
|>  transistor then, we have 20 trans. for every person on Earth.  Now, if
|>  we say that there was only ONE Burroughs 5000 (introduced in 1960), then
|>  it follows that each person has the equivalent of 20 of those machines.
|>  This is still not reasonable, though.  I think a figure of about
|>  TEN MILLION transistors in 1960 is reasonable.  That equates to 200
|>  million per person on Earth now, and that seems much too large...
|
|I though so at first, but then:
|
|I just read about ONE company with ONE fab line makeing ~800,000
|1MB DRAMs a month. That's 800 BILLION transistors per month.
|
|Of course, I am assumimg that "transistor" is not restricted to
|discrete component transitors ...

I've been following this with some interest.  It seems that some people
are flabbergasted at the idea of hundreds of billions of transistors.
Well, given today's feature sizes numbers like that are not astounding,
let alone surprising. Let's err on the high side and say gates are 2u
long.  That means that five gates can be fitted across one diameter of a
human red blood cell (approx dia=10u).  Now, how many red cells do you
suppose you carry around with you?  An adult male has about 5*10^6 red
cells per cubic MILLImeter of blood.  There are a million cubic
millimeters in a liter.  So, we have about 5*10^12 red cells per liter.
In these terms, hundreds of billions of transistors is nothing to write
home about.