Mind boggling - Transistor Production Has Reached Astronomical Scales - IEEE Spectrum

[gary]

Dan Hutcheson, in the April 2015 edition of the Institute of Electrical &
Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Spectrum magazine, provides some
mind-boggling statistics about the world production of transistors in
a short side piece entitled "Transistor Production Has Reached
Astronomical Scales".

Originally Posted by Dan Hutcheson, IEEE Spectrum

In 2014, semiconductor production facilities made some 250 billion billion (250 x 10 to the power of 18) transistors. This was, literally, production on an astronomical scale. Every second of that year, on average, 8 trillion transistors were produced. That figure is about 25 times the number of stars in the Milky Way and some 75 times the number of galaxies in the known universe.

The rate of growth has also been extraordinary. More transistors were made in 2014 than in all the years prior to 2011. Even the recent great recession had little effect. Transistor production in 2009—a year of deep recession for the semiconductor industry—was more than the cumulative total prior to 2007.

Link here - http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/h...nomical-scales

In making the comparison of 8 trillion (i.e. 8 x 10 to the power of 12)
transistors being made per second compared to the number of stars
in the Milky Way, Dan would have used the estimate of 320 billion stars.
In making the comparison against the number of galaxies in the
known universe, he would have used the estimate of 107 billion galaxies.

In any case, it either says something about the success of the semiconductor
industry or something about how finite the known universe is!

[RickS (Rick)]

And most of those transistors are used to display pictures of cats and facilitate arguments between strangers

[pluto (Hugh)]

WOW, that's incredible!
Thanks for posting Gary

[multiweb (Marc)]

Those numbers are incredible. Makes you think if we really need that many. I guess all new mobile phones go in landfill every three month. My wife works in the E-recycling industry for Simms. They get palettes of the stuff into their "shredder". Unopened. Brand new scheduled for destruction. I guess it makes more business sense to over produce and destroy rather than running short on production because of demand. The model and that way of thinking is f*cked though.

[Eratosthenes (Peter)]

that's a very big number - but way short of the biggest finite number that can be attached to a known physical process.

John D Barrow identified a number that has empirical significance = 10 raised to the power of 70,000,000,000,000 (10^70 trillion)

What does it represent? Well it has to do with the total number of different combinations that the human brain can arrange its neurons. Here is a short description of how the number is arrived at.

..... Mike Holderness suggested (in Holderness, M., “Think of a Number,” New Scientist, 16 June 2001, p. 45) that one way of estimating the number of possible thoughts that a brain could conceive is to count all those connections. The brain can do many things at once so we could view it as some number, say a thousand, little groups of neurons. If each neuron makes a thousand different links to the ten million others in the same [neuron] group then the number of different ways in which it could make connections in the same neuron group is 10^7 x 10^7 x 10^7 x … one thousand times. This gives 10^7000 possible patterns of connections. But this is just the number for one neuron group. The total number for 10^7 neurons is 10^7000 multiplied together by 10^7 times. This is 10^70,000,000,000. If the 1000 or so groups of neurons can operate independently of each other then each of them contributes 10^70,000,000,000 possible wirings, increasing the total to the Holderness number, 10^70,000,000,000,000. This is the modern estimate of the number of different electrical patterns that the brain could hold. In some sense it is the number of different possible thoughts or ideas that a human brain could.”

[clive milne]

Originally Posted by RickS

And most of those transistors are used facilitate arguments between strangers

No they're not!

[rally]

Interesting bit of info Gary !

I guess considering the average late model PC will have :
Processor from 1-5 billion (i7 is 2.7 billion)
Memory about 1 billion per GB - so say 16GB = 16 billion
A decent GPU is 2 to 8 billion

Thats 10-30 billion transistors per half decent PC !

Makes my first Z80 computer (8500) with a whopping 16K of RAM (16,000) seem like something from the steam age ! . . . and my old jars of OC series germanium transistors (1) in glass look like museum pieces.

[Steffen]

Originally Posted by clive milne

No they're not!

Yes, they are!

[RobF (Rob)]

Originally Posted by RickS

And most of those transistors are used to display pictures of cats and facilitate arguments between strangers

ROFL

[Visionary (David)]

I thought the deficit was large...