Moore's Law, Illustrated

January 6, 2009 9:15 AM

A nice photogallery, with descriptions, illustrating the progress of Moore's Law from a 1958 single-transistor Texas Instruments integrated circuit to the anticipated 2009 AMD Phenom II, with 758,000,000 transistors.
posted by beagle (14 comments total)

758,000,000. That's a hell of a lot of soybeans.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:27 AM on January 6

in 2009 our chips will grow on corncobs!
posted by delmoi at 9:28 AM on January 6

This is pretty sweet. Some are really beautiful. And I never before now realized that such a high fraction of modern CPU die area is devoted to L1 cache.
posted by grouse at 9:31 AM on January 6

Also, there was a post with most of these pictures -- but far fewer ads -- a couple months ago.
posted by delmoi at 9:31 AM on January 6

758,000,000 transistors. I bet that baby pulls in KFWB loud and clear at night.
posted by chlorus at 9:33 AM on January 6 [1 favorite has favorites]

I feared it was Archer Daniels Midland growing integrated circuits in seeds that are smart enough to fix their own prices.
posted by pracowity at 9:38 AM on January 6

And I never before now realized that such a high fraction of modern CPU die area is devoted to L1 cache.

That's the L2.
posted by Krrrlson at 9:47 AM on January 6

Wow. That's breathtaking and mindboggling.
posted by papercake at 9:48 AM on January 6

Wow. Just wow.

MOMA has the blueprints for the 8086 (I think) on display in its design exhibition.
posted by Hactar at 10:01 AM on January 6

Er, thanks Krrrlson. Sorry about that.
posted by grouse at 10:01 AM on January 6

What's really mind boggling is that they flew to the moon on 4 transistors!!
posted by ruwan at 1:09 PM on January 6

Very cool. I knew a guy who helped design chips at Intel. He was bleary-eyed from staring through a microscope all day.
posted by wastelands at 1:24 PM on January 6

Huh. So they fit a lot more processors on a chip. Meanwhile, I'm still using essentially the samme interface that I used twenty years ago. And the programs I'm using are nearly identical to the ones I was using fifteen years ago, except with some additional bells and whistles. And more importantly, I'm still using the computer for the same damn things.

So just where the hell is the revolution?
posted by happyroach at 4:52 PM on January 6

So just where the hell is the revolution?

Well, you probably weren't doing much internet surfing twenty years ago, so there's that.

And anyway, Moore's Law predicts technological improvement, not human innovation, which is the proverbial black swan, so actively looking for the Next Thing doesn't usually do much good.
posted by Amanojaku at 6:15 PM on January 6