alt Hacker Newsinteresting to be reminded that an 8080 (8 bit datapath) took 4,800 transistors
an Apple M5 Max is 100,000,000,000 transistors (ok it’s 18 CPU + 40 GPU cores) by comparison so 17 million 8080 equivalents
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This is understandable, considering that the M5 is the Ultimate Computer, powered by Dr. Richard Daystrom's very own engrams
Yup and Moore's law about transistors doubling every 18 to 24 months did basically hold, which is even more impressive.
Foreseen it was.
Nitpicking, but since the M5 includes cache and GPU a more realistic comparision would probably be to count all transistors in an entire 8-bit home computer system against a modern integrated GCPU (e.g. from googling around a C64 might have around 0.75 million transistors, most in the memory chips).
And in a way, those old 8-bit home computers also worked like a single integrated 'super-chip', because the whole system was driven by a single clock and entirely 'hard realtime', while modern computers are much more asynchronous (and I guess this asynchronous design is what enabled most performance improvements that go beyond pure transistor count scaling).
> so 17 million 8080 equivalents
At, ballpark, 1000 times the clock frequency. It’s a pity we do not how to connect such a large number of tiny cores in a way so that it can perform meaningful work. One hurdle is that, even ignoring the insane amount of connections needed, it would not be possible to connect each of those cores to each other one because their address spaces are so tiny.