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How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?

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Re: How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?

#131

Post by sweetjuly »

gpm wrote: post #89
kylec wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the chip designers at Apple know the exact number, but that doesn't mean Apple's going to share it

I wonder if they even do. I'm sure they could theoretically compute it... but is it something that is ever actually computed? It seems sort of like asking a programmer how many instructions there are in a binary we maintain. We could find out if we decided it mattered.

It's a one liner in Virtuoso (hard IPs aside). I doubt anyone memorized the exact number but it's definitely not some unknown or hard to figure out quantity.

Re: How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?

#132

Post by eru »

samwillis wrote: post #30
scarface_74 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is more amazing that we went from the Wright brothers in 1903 to landing on the moon in 1969.

And we haven't been back in 50 years, despite all the incredible technology improvements. The Apollo guidance computers had "several tens of thousands of transistors"[0], we now have 19 billion in our pocket! 0: https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/apollo-11-mank... .

Putting humans on the moon in the first place was mostly just grandstanding. Manned space exploration in general is mostly just entertainment. I'm glad humanity hasn't continued wasting resources on that particular endeavor.

Unmanned probes do good work for science. (Though even there I am not sure about the bang-for-the-buck compared to other alternatives.)

Have a look at '20 Breakthroughs from 20 Years of Science aboard the International Space Station' https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-...

That's the list of the 20 best things they could come up with. And it scarcely has anything that couldn't have been done cheaper with unmanned craft. And it includes gems like counting spending money as a benefit, instead of a cost.

Re: How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?

#133

Post by eru »

devnullbrain wrote: post #121
jacquesm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if all of the worlds armament budgets were instead rerouted to science and space travel...

20 years ago nobody spent any money on smartphones. Now, the money spent on them has created billions of processors with magnitudes more power than the spacecraft we're being wistful about. Consumerism rerouted itself to forwarding science. And that's just a device for watching cat videos. The carry-over between rockets and modern technology like hypersonic missiles is even greater - which is why we invented the spac…

Carry over is still not as efficient as directly spending on what you want.

Re: How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?

#134

Post by eru »

least wrote: post #62
scarface_74 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would spending billions on the space race help?

Numerous technological advancements have been made as a result of the space race, but asking for justification on spending money on scientific inquiry is just going to come to whether or not you support science generally.

We could have spent money directly on the technologies we are interested in. That would have likely been more efficient.

Re: How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?

#135

Post by simonh »

scarface_74 wrote: post #35
samwillis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we haven't been back in 50 years, despite all the incredible technology improvements. The Apollo guidance computers had "several tens of thousands of transistors"[0], we now have 19 billion in our pocket! 0: https://www.aei.org/technology-and-innovation/apollo-11-mank... .

I think “For All Mankind” is a great “What If” show about what things would be like if we had kept pushing forward. The thing about the series though was that NASA was self funded and didn’t have to justify spending billions in taxpayer money. Also, do we really have better propulsion technology to make space travel more efficient?

> Also, do we really have better propulsion technology to make space travel more efficient?

It’s not really the propulsion technology that’s the key, it’s not throwing away a whole bunch of rocket engines every time, just to launch something once. So it’s really a design methodology as much as the technology.

Having said that I think a key contributor to reusability is computation. As far as I’m aware all the experiments with propulsive landing in the 60s and 70s were manual. You could compute optimal thrust profiles given enough time and ideal conditions, but the conditions for an actual landing are never ideal. Particularly issues like atmospheric conditions such as air pressure by altitude, the effect of humidity, wind conditions and allows for the variability of turbulence around the vehicle. Modern automation of such must be vastly more efficient than manual control, but I don’t know when this became viable.

Re: How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?

#136

Post by corethree »

eru wrote: post #130
corethree wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's nearly as complex as you think. The important measure isn't transistors, but the amount of concepts formed by composing transistors together. There's no way in hell people can make sense of 19 billion separate concepts. Likely what's going on in the chip is just repeated patterns designed to make a very simple machine operate really really quickly. But of course I'm not denying the complexity. But…

> There's no way in hell people can make sense of 19 billion separate concepts. Likely what's going on in the chip is just repeated patterns designed to make a very simple machine operate really really quickly. You are right about human designed chips. If you use something like simulated evolution or backpropagation or some other techniques from machine learning or mathematical optimization, you can get machines with…

The human brain IS an example of such a mechanism.

We've done it artificially as well with machine learning and genetic algorithms.

The amount of concepts in the neural network of an LLM is too large for us to fully understand.

At best we can only hope to understand these things as a sort of curve fitting optimization problem.

Re: How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?

#138

Post by tigershark »

mlsu wrote: post #48

I've often struggled to really "grok" how complex chips are. They all kinda look the same. I write software, so I know how complex that is, but like the device itself -- it's this little black box. What's the difference between one little black box and another? Most people don't even get that far; they think the computer is the screen that lights up. I've been reading datasheets a lot at work. The datasheet for an ST…

You don’t really need to go in the millions to appreciate the complexity of a chip. The famous Motorola 68000 had actually 68000 transistors.

Re: How many billions of transistors in an iPhone processor?

#139

Post by hibikir »

jwells89 wrote: post #114
edgyquant wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe happy isn’t the right word, but I think it’s pretty clear people were more content and felt a sense of purpose. Social media has made things worse, but it’s really the loss of community and religion that has led to the crisis of loneliness and depression among todays people.

Modern loneliness is a far more multifaceted issue than it’s often presented as. For instance I’m sure that a major factor is the need for people to move great distances away from family and the community they grew up in to be able to find education, living wages, and other forms of opportunity. That breaks existing connections and makes it harder to form new ones, but I never see that talked about.

Those kinds of movements aren't new though: Entire generations in many a country ended up emigrating across the sea, back when it was far slower and dangerous, to make their fortunes, as their home was too poor to handle more than one son. And today we have our home culture on our phones. I can watch TV from my home country, and my home team's soccer matches live. I can video call whenever, for free.

So maintain connection has never been easier, and migration is not any worse. I have no doubt there are far more things than social media making people more unhappy than historically, but having to move away from where we were born isn't it.

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