
Transistor Production Has Reached Astronomical Scales (2015) - mtrn
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/transistor-production-has-reached-astronomical-scales
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sytelus
Interestingly, the number of transistors made on entire planet is now
comparable to number of DNA base pairs created in a single human body.

~~~
totalZero
Maybe this is how life forms are created.

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jaredhansen
... life forms? Oh you mean _these_ life forms![1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT_Q_iAnmys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT_Q_iAnmys)

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themgt
> More transistors were made in 2014 than in all the years prior to 2011.

That is an incredible bumper-sticker factoid.

Does that pace keep up, that in any given year N we're manufacturing as many
transistors as year(0 .. N-4) combined?

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dingo_bat
> Every second of that year, on average, 8 trillion transistors were produced.

Literally unable to imagine these numbers.

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QuantumRoar
Well, they are quite tiny. A billion transistors fit into the area of your
thumbnail. A typical wafer used for lithography has a diameter of 300mm. You
can fit quite a few processors on such a wafer and you only have to expose
once at each lithography step to create all of them.

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WalterBright
I have no idea how one can get a billion transistors to work. Even an
extremely small failure rate can render it impossible.

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kbart
Yes, it's an extremely technologically difficult process. That's why building
a new fab cost _billions_ [1].

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication_plan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication_plant)

~~~
WalterBright
I remember back in the 80s when engineers speculated that anything bigger than
a 64K DRAM would be impossible because nobody could get that many transistors
all working at the same time.

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mtrn
Technology is one challenge. I wonder what other kinds of scaling must take
place to sustain such industries? Like, how do you scale learning, so that a
single person or a small team is able to have a good overview plus detailed
know-how on the these complex devices.

I remember Linus Torvalds mentioning, that while the 386 was a complex CPU, he
was able to understand it on a sufficient level. But this time seems to be
gone.

~~~
pjc50
It's exactly like software: hierarchical design. You have a number of
subsystems on a chip, each one of which has interfaces and resources
requirements, the implementation of which is delegated down to teams and
individuals or composed from pre-existing pieces.

DRAM is even "easier" because it's just a repeating grid pattern. Tuning the
cell design is important for performance, as are the read sense amplifiers at
the end of each row, but once the tuning is satisfactory you just get the
software to make N copies.

Possibly the most overlooked part of the process is the bits that aren't
either taught or written down but passed on in the oral culture of the
engineers. Analog IC design is a lot more like this.

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projektfu
One transistor for each bacterium in every person's gut.

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mtrn
If we are currently at 35B transistors per person on earth produced per year,
back-of-the-envelope calculated, in 2025, we will probably have 200B
transistors per person running on this planet. Or about two DGX-1 for every
single human.

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umanwizard
10^20 billionths of $1 is a hundred billion dollars.

So transistors cost 100 billion each in 1955?

~~~
hatsunearu
Isn't the black axis the axis for the black line?

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100ideas
This chart is poorly implemented.

TLDR: The chart attempts to show the relationship between Transistors Produces
per Year and Transistor Cost per Year, but confuses the relationship by
denoting the latter quantity in units that require mental multiplication to
understand (transistor per $1.0 * $0.000000001)

\---

I see two curves, red ("Transistors Made Per Year") and black (Price Per
Transistor (Billionths of $1)), both plotted versus a common range - "years,"
\- with plot-lines horizontally and vertically to help me trace points on the
curve to their respective values.

Thank you, authors, for providing labels for the horizontal scale-lines on the
graph (the vertical axes). You've understood that I might want to understand
the relationship between different pairings of points between the red and
black curves, and the horizontal lines help me rapidly estimate y-values for
both. Or at least for the left-side y-axis (the red curve): "Transistors Made
Per Year."

To be honest, I'm having difficulty relating the the quantities denoted in the
units of the right-hand y-axis (the black curve), "Price Per Transistor
(Billionths of $1)," with both the red curve AND the x-axis.

Here's why:

I had trouble efficiently internalizing what the units of the black curve -
"Price Per Transistor (Billionths of $1)" \- really meant. I am lazy, so I
only figured it out on the third paragraph of my comment. I kept glancing at
the red curve, then the black curve and thinking something like "ok... in 1965
it looks like the red curve was about 10^9 "Transistors made that year"... and
for the black curve, it was $10 Billion per Transistor... oh wait. I mean ($10
Billion * $0.000000001) per Transistor. So I guess thats.... uh...
$10/Transistor($1)? I.e. each transistor cost $10 and $10 billion were made
total that year (ah ha, for a total silicon market cap of $10/transistor *
10,000,000,000 transistor = $100B).

Please don't make us do math to understand the units of one of the axis, if
possible.

Also, labels to denote the values of the vertical gridlines (ticks on the
x-axis) would have been helpful. Without them, we have to mentally estimate
their value by subtracting the high-side of the domain from the low-side, then
dividing by the number of tick marks (alternatively, counting from 0 the
number of vertical lines across the whole graph. In this case: (2014 -
1955)/(11 tick marks + 1) = 4.9266666... years ~5 years.

That said, I'm pleased to see more transistors were manufactured in the last
year than there are stars in several galaxies! Wow. But Kanye won't be
impressed until the number exceeds the number of all KNOWN STARS in the
UNIVERSE. So keep at it.

Lastly... Isn't VLSI so 80's? Isn't there a VLSIVLSI now or something? Maybe
VLSI^2?

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wtallis
> Lastly... Isn't VLSI so 80's? Isn't there a VLSIVLSI now or something? Maybe
> VLSI^2?

The progress from discrete transistors to small-scale integration up through
VLSI brought with it major changes in what kind of functionality could be
integrated on a single device. That's mostly stopped: early VLSI chips were
things like CPUs, and our largest chips today are still usually just
processors (or FPGAs) with a similar role in the system as a whole. We've
integrated all the co-processors and much of the I/O onto SoCs that largely
aren't pushing the limits of transistor count or die size, and there are some
instances of bringing more analog stuff like some power regulation and radios
onto the chip. But for the most part, we're still using separate chips for the
processor and the RAM and a bunch of smaller chips for various I/O tasks, even
on tiny embedded systems like smartphones.

~~~
Someone
Smart-phones aren't _" tiny embedded systems"_.

Also, smaller embedded systems do have RAM and various I/O on-chip (but not
necessarily on-die).

To grab a random (not even really tiny) one,
[http://www.atmel.com/devices/ATSAMB11.aspx](http://www.atmel.com/devices/ATSAMB11.aspx):

 _" The SAM B11 is an ultra-low power Bluetooth® SMART (BLE 4.1) System on a
Chip with Integrated MCU, Transceiver, Modem, MAC, PA, TR Switch, and Power
Management Unit (PMU). It is a standalone ARM® Cortex®-M0 applications
processor with embedded Flash memory and BLE connectivity."_

All in 6x6 mm.

~~~
wtallis
Smartphones are tiny embedded systems in the sense that they are embedded
systems, and their total circuit board area is a small multiple of the die
size of their larger chips. They're physically quite space-constrained and
don't have room for very many separate components, and the larger ones usually
end up stacked.

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a-no-n
TL;DR - humans are f'd*

*maybe, if not wise/able to constrain AI

Non-humans maybe (t/quad)rillionaires to eclipse us within our lifetimes
because of the likelihood of runaway technological acceleration.

At the 1e9m systematic level, inorganic and hybrid sentient, self-replicating,
self-improving systems seem an inevitable stage enabled by organic life.

~~~
M_Grey
To be fair, we're fucked if left to our own devices; maybe creating a new form
of life wouldn't be the worst thing we could do on the way out.

~~~
a-no-n
Not necessarily. Japan recovered from nearly deforestation a-la Easter Island.
Penalties and enforcement are required to prevent consequences of individual
and collective externalities.

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Koshkin
The number given in the article is really not that big considering that most
of these transistors are made as part of integrated circuits rather than in
the form of discrete components. A modern large-scale integrated circuit can
easily contain more than a few million transistors each.

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tasty_freeze
You are off by a factor of 1000. Top end CPUs and GPUs are in the billions of
transistors. I believe 8Gb DRAMs are shipping commercially now (so 8G
transistors and then some)

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Koshkin
Sure, but this only supports a simple point I tried to make. Let me try again:
today transistors are so small and appear in such large quantities as part of
large-scale integrated circuits that counting them is almost like counting
molecules (or, let's say, bacteria, as one commenter has pointed out earlier).
Such "astronomical scales" make for catchy headlines, but that's about it.
(Not a very interesting observation on my part, I admit.)

