To give another context to look at this in retrospective, here's [0] a die shot from a 2n3906 transistor made in 1965 (still available today). It's roughly 60µm * 60µm in size. By comparison a high end chip made in 2022 has 80 billion transistors in an area of 814mm^2 [1].
That is three hundred and fifty thousand transistors (350,000!) in the same area 58 years later.
Sorry, but you are comparing apples with oranges. This transistor can whitstand 40 V and can drive 200 mA. The other one is a processor working maybe at 3.3V or 1.8 V.
Can you give an example of a state of the art small transistor circa 1965 to make apples to apples comparisons with? The integrated circuits in the Apollo instrumentation unit perhaps?
Comments
What a visionary article and a delightful read.
To give another context to look at this in retrospective, here's [0] a die shot from a 2n3906 transistor made in 1965 (still available today). It's roughly 60µm * 60µm in size. By comparison a high end chip made in 2022 has 80 billion transistors in an area of 814mm^2 [1].
That is three hundred and fifty thousand transistors (350,000!) in the same area 58 years later.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2N3906#/media/File:2N3906_top_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopper_(microarchitecture)
Sorry, but you are comparing apples with oranges. This transistor can whitstand 40 V and can drive 200 mA. The other one is a processor working maybe at 3.3V or 1.8 V.
Can you give an example of a state of the art small transistor circa 1965 to make apples to apples comparisons with? The integrated circuits in the Apollo instrumentation unit perhaps?
OC602
Do you know its surface area?