The best invention ever.

[FlashDrive (Poppy)]

TV Remote ....

[Outcast (Carlton)]

Velcro

[gary]

If the metric of a success of an invention was how many times it had been
made, then the transistor would have few peers.

Encyclopedia Britannica says, "They are by far the most common human artifact on the planet".

And the volumes by which we are making them is growing exponentially every year.

Here is a partial chronology.

Originally Posted by National Research Council, 1999

[In 1999] Gordon Moore of Intel was fond of saying :-
"Every year more transistors are produced than raindrops over California,
and it costs less to make one than to print a single character on the page
of a book." "Every year there are more transistors manufactured than
printed characters of any type - newspapers, magazines, books, and copies
of documents. There are about as many transistors made each year -
10**16 to 10**17 - as there are ants on the entire planet. Put still
another way, each year the semiconductor industry makes 10 million
to 20 million transistors for every person on Earth."

Originally Posted by Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSI Research, 2014

In 2014, semiconductor production facilities made some 250 billion billion (250 x 10**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.

Originally Posted by Darrin Qualman, 2017

[In 2017]]Global production of transistors has surpassed 20 trillion per second—hundreds of quintillions per year.

So it is not hard to imagine that perhaps every day we produce more
transistors than all the meals consumed by all the people who have lived
on Earth for all of history. Or perhaps more than the number of stitches
made in clothing or otherwise in all of history.

Whether the transistor was "the greatest invention of all time" is a totally
different question, but there is no doubt that more have been made and
sold than any other artifact in all of human history.

[xelasnave]

Gary..what about chopsticks?
Alex

[JA]

Originally Posted by xelasnave

Gary..what about chopsticks?
Alex

Hmmmmmm Alex?

The best answer to that question might be to think of people you know with a computer of any type. Going back to the 1970s their processors were made up of tens of thousands of transistors. Now with further miniaturisation we are in to the many billions of transistors per computer CPU. And then there's phones. Anyway - not many folks have that many chopsticks at home

Best
JA

[TrevorW]

Toilet paper

[Hans Tucker (Hans)]

Originally Posted by TrevorW

Toilet paper

Bidet

[gary]

Originally Posted by xelasnave

Gary..what about chopsticks?
Alex

An estimate of the number of people who ever lived on Earth made by the BBC in 2012 was 107 billion.

Let's round that up to 110 billion people.

Say all those people in the entire history of the Earth each lived to the ripe old age of 100.

So they lived a total of
110e9 people * 100 years * 365 days = 4.02e15 person-days

Let's say they each ate 3 meals a day every day using brand new pairs of chopsticks per meal.

4.02e15 person-days * 3 meals-day * 2 chopsticks = 24.1e15 chopsticks.

That's 24.1 times ten to the power of 15 or 24.1 quadrillion chopsticks.

Yet even by 2014 we were making hundreds of quintillions of transistors
per year. That's 100 times ten to the power of 18, nearly four orders of
magnitude higher.

And of course we don't all live to 100 and we didn't all have three
meals a day in all of history using a brand new pair of chopsticks each time.

[Boozlefoot]

The telescope...............otherwise we wouldn't be on here.

[xelasnave]

Originally Posted by JA

Hmmmmmm Alex?

The best answer to that question might be to think of people you know with a computer of any type. Going back to the 1970s their processors were made up of tens of thousands of transistors. Now with further miniaturisation we are in to the many billions of transistors per computer CPU. And then there's phones. Anyway - not many folks have that many chopsticks at home

Best
JA

Mmmmmm JA I each day the people in China go through a fair few and this has gone in for some considerable time maybe a century or two or even thousands of years. Now I have not verified this but I suspect it hints at the truth...

Residents of the People's Republic of China produce 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks each year, or 130 million pairs each day, according to Los Angeles Times, which reported on the story earlier this week.20 Aug 2010

BUT THEN I FOUND THIS

Global production of transistors has surpassed 20 trillion per second—hundreds of quintillions per year. Transistors are the primary building blocks of modern electronic devices: computers, smartphones, TVs, radios, and other devices.4 Apr 2017

I call for a recount


Alex

[xelasnave]

Now just try and get your head around this...

This year, iPhone Pro models get more GPU horsepower than regular iPhones. Apple's A15 processor in the iPhone 13 has 15 billion transistors. Apple on Tuesday revealed its iPhone 13's processor, the A15 Bionic, a chip with 15 billion transistors and new graphics and AI abilities.14 Sept 2021
https://www.cnet.com › ... › Mobile
Apple's A15 Bionic chip powers iPhone 13 with 15 billion transistors

They also must rate as the cheapest "thing" per unit.
OR imagine trying to substitute with the old tube valves...the world would be entirely covered in tube valves if all the transistors turned into tube valves.
Alex

[mura_gadi (Steve)]

So many inventions rely on all that has gone before them its hard to rank them.

Is controlling fire an invention or a skill? Without simple weapons we would never have had the increased leisure time or the abundance of proteins.

I think writing, the ability to pass on knowledge over distance and time. Its the one that has the greatest chance of changing multiple aspects of society for the better.

That's what makes the internet so sad at times, we have one of the greatest dissemination engines of all times and we use it to post selfies, listen to music and troll each other.

[doug mc]

Readily available toilet paper. Just can't imagine civilisation without it. We are currently living in the year 2021 PTP (post toilet paper).

[LewisM]

Women. I like thinking I am in charge, but reality says otherwise

[Stonius (Markus)]

Originally Posted by mura_gadi

So many inventions rely on all that has gone before them its hard to rank them.

Is controlling fire an invention or a skill? Without simple weapons we would never have had the increased leisure time or the abundance of proteins.

I think writing, the ability to pass on knowledge over distance and time. Its the one that has the greatest chance of changing multiple aspects of society for the better.

That's what makes the internet so sad at times, we have one of the greatest dissemination engines of all times and we use it to post selfies, listen to music and troll each other.

Sometimes I wish this site had a 'like' button just so I could click it on posts such as these.

[gary]

Originally Posted by xelasnave

They also must rate as the cheapest "thing" per unit

When the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, fresh from having invented
the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved to Mountain View in
California, they sold their first batch of 100 transistors to IBM for $150
a pop.

If the aviation industry had gone through the same sort of price reduction
factors as the semiconductor industry, you could buy your own
A380 Airbus today for around 4 cents.

[mura_gadi (Steve)]

Originally Posted by gary

When the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, fresh from having invented
the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved to Mountain View in
California, they sold their first batch of 100 transistors to IBM for $150
a pop.

If the aviation industry had gone through the same sort of price reduction
factors as the semiconductor industry, you could buy your own
A380 Airbus today for around 4 cents.

You can get 5+ teraflop phones now, the computing power of the best Super Computers in the world when Bill Clinton walked into office was about 10% of a teraflop. They say, you have more computing power in your hands today than was available to Bill Clinton as PotUS. (Around the late 90's for the 1st teraflop super computer.)

Floating point operations:
FLOPs are simple a math procedure and used as a benchmark for CPU speeds for a long time. Bit like spinning your wheels, smoke looks good, but useless for much else.

[Hans Tucker (Hans)]

[QUOTE=mura_gadi;1538848]You can get 5+ teraflop phones now, the computing power of the best Super Computers in the world when Bill Clinton walked into office was about 10% of a teraflop. They say, you have more computing power in your hands today than was available to Bill Clinton as PotUS. (Around the late 90's for the 1st teraflop super computer.)

If we ever get back to the Moon I don't want to see any more 1202 or 1201 error messages. Plus keep Buzz away from the RADAR.

[gary]

Originally Posted by mura_gadi

You can get 5+ teraflop phones now, the computing power of the best Super Computers in the world when Bill Clinton walked into office was about 10% of a teraflop. They say, you have more computing power in your hands today than was available to Bill Clinton as PotUS. (Around the late 90's for the 1st teraflop super computer.)

Hi Steve,

In 2016 I read an engineering article about how surprisingly low the
MTBF was of state-of-the-art supercomputers.

We are all familiar with the notoriously short MTBF numbers of early
vacuum tube computers like ENIAC which would be in order of an hour.

And we are all familiar with PC's at home or work operating reliably
indefinitely. Switched on continually, you may never see a hardware
related crash in months or even years.

But if you want to be at the absolute cutting edge of high performance
supercomputing in the petaFlop and exaFlop range, when it comes to
MTBF figures, few things have changed since the days of vacuum tube
computers.

Cosmic-radiation would be one big cause of failures, with one machine
at Los Alamos, even after putting extra metal shielding on it, only
running for about 6 hours before crashing. Another at Virginia
Tech’s Advanced Computing facility which consisted of 1,100 Apple
Power Mac G5 CPU's but no ECC on the RAM, had a failure rate so high
from cosmic radiation that it was nearly impossible even to boot the
whole system before it would crash.

A Cray XT-5 at Oak Ridge had 360 terabytes of main memory with ECC
and it would log ECC errors at a rate of 350 per minute.

The IBM Blue Gene/L system at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which was
the largest computer in the world between 2004 to 2008, would frequently
crash and the culprit was found to be radioactive lead in the solder.

The Cray XK7 Titan was the top supercomputer system in the world for a
long time and consisted of 18,688 NVIDIA GPUs but even it had a MTBF
during some periods of its life of less than a day.

Anyway, I had only just read this article in 2016 when I happened to
meet someone who was involved in supercomputing at the Sandia
National Laboratories. I said to him I had read that the MTBF could be less
than a day and he replied, "Oh no, much worse than that. Typically in the
order of only 30 minutes".

[xelasnave]

Originally Posted by gary

An estimate of the number of people who ever lived on Earth made by the BBC in 2012 was 107 billion.

Let's round that up to 110 billion people.

Say all those people in the entire history of the Earth each lived to the ripe old age of 100.

So they lived a total of
110e9 people * 100 years * 365 days = 4.02e15 person-days

Let's say they each ate 3 meals a day every day using brand new pairs of chopsticks per meal.

4.02e15 person-days * 3 meals-day * 2 chopsticks = 24.1e15 chopsticks.

That's 24.1 times ten to the power of 15 or 24.1 quadrillion chopsticks.

Yet even by 2014 we were making hundreds of quintillions of transistors
per year. That's 100 times ten to the power of 18, nearly four orders of
magnitude higher.

And of course we don't all live to 100 and we didn't all have three
meals a day in all of history using a brand new pair of chopsticks each time.

Sorry to take my time getting back to you but I just had to check your sums well not really...I realised no matter how huge the number number of chop sticks we wont be any where near the transistor numbers, when replying to JA...I must thank you for drawing attention to the transistor the numbers etc..it is mind bending.
Alex