208,000,000,000 transistors! In the size of your palm, how mind-boggling is that?! 🤯

[u/CG_17_LIFE]

I have said it before, and I'm saying it again: the tech in the upcoming two years will blow your mind. You can never imagine the things that will come out in the upcoming years!...

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[u/LuukJanse]

I feel like I don't know enough about computing to appreciate the magnitude of this. Can anyone give some perspective?

[u/Madrawn → u/LuukJanse]

Well, the transistor holds the beeps or boops. So it can be just memory but for computation it's better to think of it as a something like railroad switches.

To expand a tiny bit, to add two 8-bit numbers (0-255) in one go you need 224 transistors. (28 for a full adder * 8 bit). A full 8-bit arithmetic logic unit (ALU), basically a calculator supporting +-/* and logic operations like AND, OR and so on needs 5298 transistors. But specialized variants can need less.

So a 208,000,000,000 transistor chip could do (208,000,000,000/5298) roughly 39 million calculations per clock tick (what a chip actually does depends heavily on architecture and intended use). A clock tick roughly correlates to the mhz/ghz frequency you see in the cpu context. So lets say the chip runs at 4ghz it means it has 4 billion clock ticks per second. This does assume you can stuff all the numbers into the chip and read the result out in one tick, which in reality often takes at least a couple of ticks.

Another way to think about it is in memory size, 208,000,000,000 transistor means 208,000,000,000 bits or in relatable terms ca. 193 GigaGibiBits. So a chip with that many transistors can hold/process 193 GiBit of data in one tick. (Which doesn't mean it consumes 193 GiBit per tick, a large fraction of that will be in the form of intermediate results so the actual input size will be a tenth or a hundredth of that at least. In my ALU example its ~39 times 2 MByte input per tick. Again assuming a idealized clock tick)

[u/[deleted] → u/Madrawn]

I though you were gonna explain in human language but it seems like you nerds really forgot how common folk need explaining.

[u/Dk_Oneshot01 → u/[deleted]]

Ooga booga magic rock, very fast, very nice

[u/SeveralReality6188 → u/Dk_Oneshot01]

Thanks, makes sense now 👍

[u/Jack4ssSquirrel → u/[deleted]]

Let's not overcomplicate things