![]() ![]() Computer chips cycle faster today, and they also sport sophisticated math co-processors and graphics chips. Moreover, computing power has increased even faster than the huge increases in transistor count would indicate. This number is close to the 500,000-fold increase calculated above by comparing the number of transistors in a 6502 chip to the number in an Intel i7 chip. That CPU contains about 2,000,000,000 transistors-roughly 500,000 times more than my Apple II.Īssuming a doubling every 2 years, in the 39 years between 1979 (my Apple II) and 2018 (My Lenovo) we should have seen 19.5 doublings in the number of transistors-about a 700,000-fold increase. In the upper right, the graph includes the Intel i7 processor in my new laptop. That CPU chip contained about 3,500 transistors. In the lower-left, the graph includes the CPU from my 1979 Apple II computer, the Motorola/MOS 6502. The graph above illustrates Moore’s Law and shows the transistor count for many important computer central processing units (CPUs) over the past five decades. ( Here’s a link to a high-resolution version of the graph.) Note that the graph’s vertical axis is logarithmic what appears as a doubling is actually a far larger increase. Loosely stated, a given amount of money will buy twice as much computing power two or three years from now. (See this post for data on the astronomical rate of annual transistor production.) Related to Moore’s Law is the price-performance ratio of computers. In 1965, Moore published a paper in which he observed that the number of transistors in computer chips was doubling every two years, and he predicted that this doubling would go on for some years to come. Gordon Moore was a founder of Intel Corporation, one of the world’s leading computer processor and “chip” makers. The preceding trends have been understood for half a century-the basis for Moore’s Law. The same is true of processing power-the amount of raw computation you can buy for a dollar. Computer memory is millions of times cheaper. Yet my new laptop cost a fraction of the inflation-adjusted prices of that Apple II. My recently purchased Lenovo laptop has 16 gigabytes-a million times more. My 1979 Apple II had 16 kilobytes of memory. I can reprise these same cost reductions, focusing on computer memory rather than hard disk capacity. Or, to put it another way, for the same money I can buy millions of times more storage. Hard disk storage capacity has become millions of times cheaper in just over a generation. But it didn’t cost that: it was just $139. At $200 per MB (the 1980s price) the hard drive I picked up from Staples would have cost me $800 million dollars-not much under a billion once I paid sales taxes. So, that 4 TB drive contains 4 million MBs. What would that 4 TB hard drive have cost me if prices had remained the same as in the 1980s? Well, one terabyte is equal to a million megabytes. ![]() On my way home last week I stopped by an office-supply store and paid $139 for a 4 terabyte (TB) hard drive. That’s $200 per MB (in today’s dollars).įast forward to 2018. In the mid-1980s, a 20-megabyte (MB) hard drive cost $2,000 ($4,000 in today’s dollars). But in 1986 or ’87 the price for a hard disk came down to an “affordable” $2,000, and I and many Mac owners were tempted. Soon after, Apple and other companies started selling external hard-disk drives for the Mac. In 1985 I bought an Apple Macintosh computer. ![]()
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