Idle Rambling -- Back To The Apple M1 Chip -- With Another Bit Of Trivia I've Not Seen Pointed Out Elsewhere -- November 23, 2020

Locator: 10010AWS.

Yesterday, I had a very, very long post on the new Apple M1 chip which is setting all kinds of records. It is the first chip with 16 billion transistors that is available for the individual user like you and me. 

As part of that post, I linked the wiki site that provides a very, very long table of all chips and the number of transistors on those chips manufactured since 1970.

The list is too long to reproduce but I need to point out something that I missed the first time (actually, I did not miss it; I simply did not want to bring up yet another data point in that very, very long note). 

So, I have posted a "reader's digest" version of the list since 2018 when Apple introduced the Apple A12X used for its iPhones. 

Chip	# transistors on the chip	Year	Designer	Six transistors
Apple A12X	10 billion	2018	Apple	7 nm
Fujitsu A64FX	9 billion	2018	Fujitsu	7 nm
Tegra Xavier SoC	9 billion	2018	Nvidia	12 nm
AMD Ryzen	6 billion	2019	AMD	7 & 12 nm	TSMC
HiSilicon Kirin	8 billion	2019	Huawei	7 nm
Apple A13	8.5 billion	2019	Apple	7 nm
AMD Ryzen	10 billon	2019	AMD	7 & 12 nm	TSMC
HiSilicon Kirin	10.3 billion	2019	Huawei	7 nm
AWS Graviton 2	30 billion	2019	Amazon	7 nm
AMD Epyc Rome	39.5 billion	2019	AMD	7 & 12 nm	TSMC
Apple M1	16 billion	2020	Apple	5 nm
HiSilicon Kiri 9000	15.3 billion	2020	Huawei	5 nm

There are twelve chips on that very, very short list. Look at the designer. Everyone should recognize Apple and AMD. Most will recognize Huawei. But then, look at #9 on that list, and based on the number of transistors on its chip would be ranked #2 (30 billion transistors) to #1 AMD/TSMC (40 billion transistors). 

AWS. Amazon Web Services. Designer: Amazon. 

That simply blows me away. Who knew? This speaks volumes about Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Again, who knew? Never discussed in the mainstream media. Wow, if it weren't for blogs like this, no one would ever know. LOL.

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Steve, Oh, Steve

Still one of my favorite video clips of all time.

That was 2007.

Fast forward to 2020, November 23:

Market value:

• MSFT: $1.589 trillion
• AAPL: $1.936 trillion

Wow, I miss Steve Jobs. 

Link here.  Best ten-minute presentation ever. 2007. Which by the way was the same year the Bakken revolution in North Dakota began.

Jobs' bare bones presentations back in 2007 still beat out the slick Tim Cook presentations in 2020. 

Tim Cook must have remembered that presentation -- now, Apple is making its own record-setting chips. And for the most part, price points have not changed appreciably. Imagine all the money that went into R&D for putting 16 billion 5-nm transistors on a chip.

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The MOS-Integrated Circuit Technology

From wiki:

The development of MOS integrated circuit technology in the 1960s led to the development of the first microprocessors. 

The 20-bit MP944, developed by Garrett AiResearch for the U.S. Navy's F-14 Tomcat fighter in 1970, is considered by its designer Ray Holt to be the first microprocessor. 

It was a multi-chip microprocessor, fabricated on six MOS chips. However, it was classified by the Navy until 1998. The 4-bit Intel 4004, released in 1971, was the first single-chip microprocessor. It was made possible with an improvement in MOSFET design, MOS silicon-gate technology (SGT), developed in 1968 at Fairchild Semiconductor by Federico Faggin, who went on to use MOS SGT technology to develop the 4004 with Marcian Hoff, Stanley Mazor and Masatoshi Shima at Intel.