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

Header 1	Header 2	Header 3
row 1, cell 1	row 1, cell 2	row 1, cell 3
row 2, cell 1	row 2, cell 2	row 2, cell 3
row 3, cell 1	row 3, cell 2	row 3, cell 3

Sources

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count