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So according to Moore's law, he should have seen things get 106528681 times more transistors at Intel!



Moore's law: Transistor count doubles every 18 months. Assuming 40 years at the company (it's a bit less) that's: 2^(40/1.5) = 67,108,864

The 62 Core Xeon Phi has 5 billion transistors. Divided by that number is: 149. That's a bit low. The Intel 8080 that came out in 1974 (when he joined the company) had 4,500 transistors. Looks like Moore's law has been slowing down a bit in recent years. Probably due to the focus on reduced energy usage.

EDIT: It works out if you replace "18 months" by "24 months". Revised value: 2^(38/2) = 524288. Impressive still.


2^(40/1.5) is 106528681, just like I posted...

Which calculator are you using? Does it use a Pentium CPU with the famous division bug perhaps? :)


I was using the "bc" command line calculator. Turns out it's rounding the exponent. The revised number is correct, though.


Note to self: never use the bc command line calculator.




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