interesting 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
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).