Ever wonder what every Intel CPU looked like between the years of 1971 and 2007?
Here is the Intel 4004 processor from 1971:
It operated at 108 KHz, has 2,300 transistors and was fabbed at 10 microns (or 10,000 nm)
And this is latest Penryn model from this fall:
It operates at 3+ GHz, has 820,000,000 transistors and was fabbed at 45 nm (or .045 microns)
Thus, in less than 4 decades, chip frequency has increased 30,000x and transistor count has increased 350,000x. All of this was crammed into an area 222x smaller than the original 1971 base part.
As I stated in What is wrong with Moore’s Law, this is a good illustration of engineering innovation in the form of extreme miniaturization. These numbers alone do not prove that the processor is any better at calculating formulas or conducting any productive utility.
What fanboys should do is produce the following numbers for every Intel or AMD processor: Watts per MIPS and FLOPS. And take that and adjust the retail sale price (USD) for baseline inflation (1971).
Despite the steady decline in the value of a dollar, I suspect that the technical numbers have increased exponentially, just as the die-size has decreased geometrically.
See also:
So, you want to make a computer chip
What do Botnets and GPGPUs have in common?
GPU versatility
Seth Lloyd’s Million Megahertz CPU