Moore’s Law in the palm of your hand

posted by Bryan Rhoads on January 13, 2008

core_2.jpg

We took the silicon core of an Intel Core 2 Duo microprocessor, a camera and a microphone to the Las Vegas Strip here at CES 2008… and asked people ‘What is this thing?”

See the reactions for yourself.

For those who haven’t seen one, they’re quite beautiful and extraordinary. Fans of good design will marvel at the mind-boggling intricacy of 400-million transistors in about the size of a dime. All brought to you by Intel’s leading 45nm process technology.

Transistors are the tiny switches that process the ones and zeroes of the digital world. They make everything on the Internet and in your computer possible… including this sentence.

For comparison, approximately 400 of Intel’s 45nm transistors could fit on the surface of a single human red blood cell.

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14 Responses to Moore’s Law in the palm of your hand

  1. Rebecca says:
    January 10, 2008 at 3:22 pm

    Fun video, real people, great job!!

  2. georgete says:
    January 10, 2008 at 9:02 pm

    Wow… That’s Intel’s microchips making the unbelievable possible.

  3. Steven says:
    January 11, 2008 at 11:26 am

    What the guy actually handed the people was only a part (silicon core) of an Intel Core 2 Duo chip… not the entire thing. This video descriptiong even tells us that. If he had handed me the finished product I would have known exactly what it was. I bet others would have too.

  4. jayasurya das says:
    January 11, 2008 at 8:04 pm

    intel’s next 32 nm and 22nm process will scale down the size of the chip and more than 400 million transistors of course will fit on the surface of a single human red blood cell.

  5. alex says:
    January 13, 2008 at 8:03 am

    it’s just the start of the future so let’s go Intel!

  6. Sant says:
    January 14, 2008 at 10:05 am

    WOW ! What will be the future?

  7. Richard says:
    January 14, 2008 at 10:57 am

    Yo, Steven, That IS atually the *WHOLE* *THING*! The “rest of it” is only the package which takes several different forms, but these days resembles a small, green printed-circuit board.

  8. sanath says:
    January 15, 2008 at 10:13 pm

    hey jayasurya das are you sanath jayasurya? spin bowling world champion of the sri lanka?

  9. Alex says:
    January 17, 2008 at 2:55 pm

    Whatever it’s the future is with intel and the new Quantum technology. Ahh I can’t wait to see a quantum computer I give about 5-10 years to be completed developed. I hope Intel is enthusiast about it too.

  10. petio says:
    January 18, 2008 at 1:52 am

    Maximum 9 more years Moore’s Law

  11. techborneo.com says:
    January 18, 2008 at 8:35 pm

    Wow that is an amazing achievement! nice video you got there.

  12. Luis says:
    January 20, 2008 at 7:57 pm

    hmmm…I really wonder how much smaller can it go. Well I’m looking forward to the Nano-technology to help improve the obstacles of making transistors smaller, my hopes are set on Carbon Nanotubes to overcome the shrinking size problem!! i’ll give them about 8 more years for that to happen though

  13. Anonymous says:
    March 2, 2008 at 8:34 am

    Just like Steven, (two comments below) that is just the core, not the entire finished product, and cores that small are not so remarkable they have been around from quite a while. When Intel makes a finished product that small ( ready to stick into a motherboard then I’ll be impressed.

  14. backpackcomputing says:
    April 2, 2008 at 8:41 am

    Atom is an amazing step forward as much for it’s low price point as for the use of 45 nm technology. It is ushering in an era of mobility and net meshing that will be ubiquitous in a few years. Having said that, 5 years from now, with advent of CPUs with hundreds of cores and several orders of magnitude of greater processing power (and the attendant advances in applications like seamless AI and augmented reality), today’s bleeding edge products will seem like antiques. If you’re interested in the latest news on ultraportable computers check out http://backpackcomputing.com