Monday, October 1, 2007

'Thousands' or transistor²

The Alan Kay quote in my previous post made me think of Montecito, the new Itanic version with 1.72 billion transistors. Compare that to the ARM6, which had a measly 35K transistors, including its 4K cache.

Dividing the two numbers gets you almost 50K. That's how many ARM6 CPUs you could get on the same chip with the same transistor budget as the Montecito. A processor for every object. Or viewed another way, more ARM6-equivalents than the ARM6 has transistors. Which begs the question: is the Montecito proportionally as much an improvement in computational capacity as an ARM6 is over a single transistor?

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