It is a multi-purpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and provides results as output. JSTOR ( December 2019) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ī microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit.Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this subsection. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. This subsection needs additional citations for verification. The curve shows counts doubling every two years, per Moore's law. Transistor count Plot of MOS transistor counts for microprocessors against dates of introduction.

Įstimates of the total numbers of transistors manufactured:

Ionic transistor chips ('water-based' analog limited processor), have up to hundreds of such transistors. The first carbon nanotube computer had 178 transistors and was a 1-bit one-instruction set computer, while a later one is 16-bit (its instruction set is 32-bit RISC-V though). Early experimental solid-state computers had as few as 130 transistors but used large amounts of diode logic. In terms of computer systems that consist of numerous integrated circuits, the supercomputer with the highest transistor count as of 2016 was the Chinese-designed Sunway TaihuLight, which has for all CPUs/nodes combined 'about 400 trillion transistors in the processing part of the hardware' and 'the DRAM includes about 12 quadrillion transistors, and that's about 97 percent of all the transistors.' To compare, the smallest computer, as of 2018 dwarfed by a grain of rice, had on the order of 100,000 transistors. Wafer-scale design of 84 exposed fields (dies)ĭual-die SoC entire M2 Ultra is a multi-chip module Stacked package of sixteen 232-layer 3D NAND dies The highest transistor count in a consumer microprocessor as of June 2023 is 134 billion transistors, in Apple's ARM-based dual-die M2 Ultra system on a chip, which is fabricated using TSMC's 5 nm semiconductor manufacturing process. Īs of 2024, the GPU with the highest transistor count is Nvidia's GB200 Grace Blackwell, built on TSMC's 4 nm process and totalling 208 billion MOSFETs. It has 2.6 trillion MOSFETs in 84 exposed fields (dies) on a wafer, manufactured using TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process. The highest transistor count in a single chip processor as of 2020 is that of the deep learning processor Wafer Scale Engine 2 by Cerebras. However, being directly proportional to the area of a chip, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is: a better indication of this is transistor density (the ratio of a chip's transistor count to its area).Īs of 2023, the highest transistor count in flash memory is Micron's 2 terabyte ( 3D-stacked) 16-die, 232-layer V-NAND flash memory chip, with 5.3 trillion floating-gate MOSFETs ( 3 bits per transistor). The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity (although the majority of transistors in modern microprocessors are contained in cache memories, which consist mostly of the same memory cell circuits replicated many times). The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device (typically on a single substrate or 'chip').

Transistor based computer