Hacker News Reader

Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

I went looking for a recent estimate of the number of transistors that have been manufactured. It appears to be in the range of 10^23. I'm pretty sure there in nothing else anyone has invented that has been replicated in such volume.

View on HN

It's amazing to think of a thing someone has made or has helped make be so numerous. And a physical thing too not software or words or an idea an actual thing.

Transistors on a CPU are actual things. Intel or AMD CPUs having billions. One CPU the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) as they describe it "has 2.6 trillion transistors, which make up 850,000 AI-optimized processing units". That's one big chip!

Wow, nearly a mole. I remember thinking that a mole of any "thing" was impossible.

1/6th of the way to Avocado's Number. ;)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-density

Interpolate out and we'll be at a mole in 1-2 years

What about bits on drive platters? Do they count as individually manufactured units?

I'll be the first to admit this is a meaningless debate but seems fun!

I'll say no

We don't colloquial think of a HDD bit as a manufactured unit on magnetic disks. It doesn't have a direct macro connection/object.

For SSDs the macro analog of a bit storage is a register and those are like 6 nand gates which those are made of like 3 transistors?

Exact numbers are wrong I'm sure. It's been a long time.

I'm not so sure. Last time I followed the field, modern HDDs were nanostructured, such that each magnetic domain was literally a physically distinguishable object, in a sense. I'm not sure if that's still the case, and I'm also not 100% sure that ever made it in to production, but I'm pretty sure it did.

At least as of the last time I read the domains were a pretty uncontrolled result of the crystalization and each bit is covering a few statistically. Nanopatterning of the sort your describing would let you make the bits smaller and hence weaker by ensuring a separation and friendlier magnetic environment.

You can still walk into a store and buy one transistor but you can't buy one storage bit. Not sure if that is an argument but interesting.

A toggle switch is one bit.

A register is one bit as well but you can't buy it in magnetic format

core memory?

Flip flops existed before transistors.

For a modern SSD, it requires several transistors to store a byte so it's still transistors all the way down.

Penicillin molecules

I was thinking the same! Something bio, that has the benefit of exponential growth

Discovered not invented. And grown not fabricated.

Potato potato

Interesting. Do you have a source?

How does it compare to other tech, like nails? Or cups? Shoes?

Be careful with large numbers: 10^23 shoes would be roughly 854B shoes for every (~117B) human that have ever lived, that is about 14 million pairs of shoes per individual and per day. I am pretty sure there has never been a market for that many shoes.

Truly the shoe event horizon. Next step: become birds.

IEEE

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-density

Interpolate out and we're close to 10^23

Letters?

Paperclips?

An average paper clip is 204.8mm^3. 10^23 of those would be 2.048x10^19 L in volume[1]. That would be only two orders of magnitude less than total volume of oceans 1.33x10^21 L [2]. So I think not.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=volume+of+a+paperclip+t...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=total+volume+of+oceans

10^23? Maybe if we push all the way to AGI.

Is that a reference to the "Universal Paperclips" game?

Basically, yes. Or at least it's related. The game is based on (arguably, a misinterpretation of) the writings of Elizer Yudkowski.

Interesting numbers.

How does it fare if we compare against those that are measured by weight ?

Edit:typo

> in the range of 10^23. I'm pretty sure there in nothing else anyone has invented that has been replicated in such volume

Covid-19 coronavirus particle/strands

Reply on news.ycombinator.com