52 Years of Leaps in Processor Performance

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Gordon Moore, one of Intel's founders, once said that the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every 18 months. In other words, processor performance doubles about every two years. As an empirical statement, this sentence reveals the rapid development of information technology to a certain extent, and later became the famous "Moore's Law".

Transistors on integrated circuits are the basic building blocks that regulate the operation of computers, mobile phones and other modern electronic circuits. Due to their fast response and high precision, transistors are widely used for a variety of digital and analog functions, including amplification, switching, voltage regulation, signal modulation, and oscillators.

Beginning with the birth of Intel 4004, 52 years of microprocessor history have been written. Recently, the Belgian microelectronics center IMEC released a statistical map comparing the transistor density changes of processor chips from 1970 to 2022. It was found that in the past 52 years, the number of transistors in CPU chips has increased by 100 million times. It's fair to say that almost no field is growing as fast as this.

In 1971, Intel introduced the world's first microprocessor 4004, the first four-bit microprocessor available for microcomputers, containing 2300 transistors; in 1974, Intel introduced the second-generation microprocessor. Processor 8080, which contains 29,000 transistors. With the continuous development of technology, the Intel Pentium processor came out in 1993, which already contained 3 million transistors; in 2002, the Intel Pentium 4 processor was launched, with 55 million transistors.

As of 2010, the number of transistors in Intel PC processors was growing at about 40 percent per year. In the ensuing years, that percentage dropped to half. The increase in transistor counts for the company's server MPUs paused in the mid-to-late 2000s, but then started growing again at about 25 percent per year.

Now in 2022, Apple's M1 Ultra chip has 114 billion transistors, 100 million times more than 52 years ago. However, the chip with 114 billion transistors will not be the end. Intel also expects to achieve 1 trillion transistors in 2030.

With the continuous improvement of technology and integration, the size of transistors is approaching the physical limit, and it is difficult to continue to rely on shrinking processes to improve performance and economic benefits. At the same time, the computing demand in artificial intelligence, big data, 5G and other fields is increasing massively. How to break through Moore's Law has become a new challenge in the era of computing power economy.