Chapter 1: Nick Nicholls, Albert Chu

Transistor Count

According to the text, since 1971 the number of transistors on a chip has increased from 2,300 to 167 million in 2006. By 2011, the transistor count had further increased to 2.6 billion, a 1,130,434x increase from 1971. The clock frequency has also continued to rise, if a bit slower since 2006. At the time, it was around 2.4ghz, a 3k multiple of the speed in 1971 of 750khz. Now the high end clock speed of a processor is in the 3.3ghz range.

Increase

Evolution of Intel Processors

Table 1.1: Evolution of Intel Processors

From	Procs	Specifications	New Features
2000	Pentium IV	1.4-3GHz, 55M transistors	hyper-pipelining, SMT
2006	Xeon	64-bit, 2GHz, 167M transistors, 4MB L2 cache on chip	Dual core, virtualization support
2007
2008
2009
2010	Core i3	2.93-3.33 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache, 512 KB L2 cache, 4MB L3 cache
2011

Sources

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count