April 27th, 2015

Wow, they really crammed a lot into those 410 transistors

A colleague of mine pointed out that in yesterday’s Seattle Times, there was an article about Moore’s Law. To illustrate the progress of technology, they included some highlights, including the following piece of trivia:

The Core 2 Duo processor with 410 transistors made its debut in 2002.

You can see the photo and caption in the online version of the article if you go to the slide show and look at photo number three.

This is an impressive feat. Intel managed to cram a Core 2 Duo into only an eighth as many transistors as the 6502.

On the other hand, it does help to explain why the chip has so few registers. There weren’t any transistors left!

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Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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