Wednesday, August 6, 2008

About a Billion Transistors on New 45nm Chips

Intel’s newest range of microprocessors, the dual core & quad core Penryn offerings have more than 400 million transistors & more than 800 million transistors in their silicon space respectively. It's amazing to be able to make such small things work! I reckon going smaller will continue until it's too expensive to go any smaller.

Some fun facts about the 45nm transistor technology:


• More than 2 million 45nm transistors can fit in the period at the end of the sentence.
• 2000 of 45nm transistors can be placed on the width of a human hair.
• A 45nm transistor can switch on & off 300 billion instances per second. A light beam can travel a tenth of an inch during the duration a transistor switches on & off.

2 comments:

Selerines said...

Thats awesome... Technology improved a lot.. But how far it is affordable? Thats the matter... Still lot more to come... Cheers dude....

Nice post.. Thanks for the info...

Abas KS said...

Hi, Shiva. Yeah, it is why I usually wait like 6 months for the price of a chip, laptop, & etc to drop. I try to do without the latest stuff unless they are value for money buys.

Thanks for stopping by, Shiva.

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