Transistors Essay Example

Intel processor transistors have approximately doubled in counts every eighteen months to two years, according to Moore’s Law ((Brown, Isley, Schroeder & Simpson, 2011). See chart below (Simmon, 2011).
Processor Trasistor Count by Year*
Date of introduction Processor Transistor count Manufacturer
1971 Intel 4004 2,300 Intel
1972 Intel 8008 3,500 Intel
1974 Intel 8080 4,500 Intel
1976 Intel 8085 6,500 Intel
1978 Intel 8086 29,000 Intel
1979 Intel 8088 29,000 Intel
1982 Intel 80186 55,000 Intel
1982 Intel 80286 134,000 Intel
1985 Intel 80386 275,000 Intel
1989 Intel 80486 1,180,235 Intel
1993 Pentium 3,100,000 Intel
1995 Pentium Pro 5500000 Intel
1997 Pentium II 7,500,000 Intel
1999 Pentium III 9,500,000 Intel
2000 Pentium 4 42,000,000 Intel
2008 Atom 47,000,000 Intel
2002 Itanium 2 McKinley 220,000,000 Intel
2006 Core 2 Duo 291,000,000 Intel
2003 Itanium 2 Madison 6M 410,000,000 Intel
2004 Itanium 2 with 9MB cache 592,000,000 Intel
2008 Core i7 (Quad) 731,000,000 Intel
2011 Quad-Core + GPU Core i7 1,160,000,000 Intel
2010 Six-Core Core i7 (Gulftown) 1,170,000,000 Intel
2012 Quad-Core + GPU Core i7 1,400,000,000 Intel
2006 Dual-Core Itanium 2 1700000000 Intel
2008 Six-Core Xeon 7400 1,900,000,000 Intel
2010 Quad-Core Itanium Tukwila 2000000000 Intel
2011 Six-Core Core i7/8-Core Xeon E5 (Sandy Bridge-E/EP) 2270000000 Intel 2010 8-Core Xeon Nehalem-EX 2300000000 Intel
2011 10-Core Xeon Westmere-EX 2,600,000,000 Intel
2012 8-Core Itanium Poulson 3,100,000,000 Intel
2012 62-Core Xeon Phi 5,000,000,000 Intel
Being that Moore’s Law is not based on any type of physics and purely on observations of trends then I would consider it to be a reasonable growth rate. The rate of increase is not at all surprising once compared to the increase over the last four decades.
If one would have to estimate on when the transistor counts would reach 100 billion, according to Moore’s Law, it would be somewhere between 2018 and 2020.

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