Module Three Discussion Question:

Solve the problem below. Copy the description of your forecast in the box below and include that as part of your initial Discussion post in Brightspace. Using "copy" from here in Mobius and "paste" into Brightspace should work.

Hint: The chart is taken from https://ourworldindata.org/technological-progress.

From the chart, estimate (roughly) the number of transistors per IC in 2016. Using your estimate and Moore's Law, what would you predict the number of transistors per IC to be in 2040?

In some applications, the variable being studied increases so quickly ("exponentially") that a regular graph isn't informative. There, a regular graph would show data close to 0 and then a sudden spike at the very end. Instead, for these applications, we often use logarithmic scales. We replace the y-axis tick marks of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. with y-axis tick marks of 10¹ = 10, 10² = 100, 10³ = 1000, 10⁴ = 10000, etc. In other words, the logarithms of the new tick marks are equally spaced.

Technology is one area where progress is extraordinarily rapid. Moore's Law states that the progress of technology (measured in different ways) doubles every 2 years. A common example counts the number of transitors per integrated circuit. A regular y-axis scale is appropriate when a trend is linear, i.e. 100 transistors, 200 transistors, 300 transistors, 400 transistors, etc. However, technology actually increased at a much quicker pace such as 100 transistors,.1,000 transistors, 10,000 transistors, 100,000 transistors, etc.

The following is a plot of the number of transistors per integrated circuit over the period 1971 - 2008 taken from https://ourworldindata.org/technological-progress (that site contains a lot of data, not just for technology). At first, this graph seems to show a steady progression until you look carefully at the y-axis ... it's not linear. From the graph, it seems that from 1971 to 1981 the number of transistors went from about 1,000 to 40,000. Moore's Law predicts that in 10 years, it would double 5 times, i.e. go from 1,000 to 32,000, and the actual values (using very rough estimates) seem to support this.

The following is the same plot but with the common logarithm of the y-axis shown. You can see that log(y) goes up uniformly.

Questions to be answered in your Brightspace Discussion:

Part a: The number of transistors per IC in 1972 seems to be about 4,000 (a rough estimate by eye). Using this estimate and Moore's Law, what would you predict the number of transistors per IC to be 20 years later, in 1992?

Prediction =

Part b: From the chart, estimate (roughly) the number of transistors per IC in 2016. Using your estimate and Moore's Law, what would you predict the number of transistors per IC to be in 2040?

Part c: Do you think that your prediction in Part b is believable? Why or why not?

Our World in Data Moore's Law The number of transistors on integrated circuit chips (1971-2018) Moore's law describes the empirical regularity that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. This advancement is important as other aspects of technological progress - such as processing speed or the price of electronic products - are linked to Moore's law. 50,000,000,000 o ignon Multi Titan 10,000,000,000 5,000,000,000 1,000,000,000 500,000,000 100,000,000 50,000,000 10,000,000 5,000,000 Intel 80486 1,000,000 500,000 TI Explorer's 32-bit Lisp machine chip Intel 803860 Inte 19600 Motorola 68020 100,000 Intel 80286 Motorola 66000 50,000 Intel 80186 Intel 8086 Intel 8088 OARM 2 SARM 1 Motorola 65C816 6809 10,000 TMS 1000 Zilog 280 RCA 1802 ntel 8085 882 5,000 Intel 8008 Intel 8080 Motorola Mos Technology Intel 4004 6800 1,000 72-core Xeon Phi Centriq 2400 GC2IPU SPARC M7 32-core AMD Epyc IBM 213 Storage Controller Apple A12X Bionic 18-core Xeon Haswell-E5 Tegra Xavier SoC 8 Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx/SCX8180 Xbox One main SoC 61-core Xeon Phi 33 HiSilicon Kirin 980 + Apple A12 Bionic 12-core POWERA- HiSilicon Kirin 710 8-core Xeon Nehalem-EX 10-core Core i7 Broadwell-E Six-core Xeon 7400 Dual-core Itanium 2 Dual-core + GPU Iris Core i7 Broadwell-U Quad-core + GPU GT2 Core i7 Skylake K Pentium D Presler POWERE Quad-core + GPU Core i7 Haswell 2 with Core i7 (Quad) Apple A7 (dual-core ARM64 "mobile SoC") AMD K10 quad-core 2M L3 Itanium 2 Madison 6MO Core 2 Duo Wolfdale Pentium D Smithfield Core 2 Duo Conroe Itanium 2 McKinley Cell Core 2 Duo Wolfdale 3M Pentium 4 Prescott-2M Core 2 Duo Allendale AMD K8 Pentium 4 Prescott Pentium 4 Cedar Mill Pentium 4 Northwoodo Barton Pentium 4 Willamette Pentium III Tualatin Atom Pentium II Mobile Dixono ARM Cortex-A9 AMD K7 Pentium III Coppermine AMD K6-111 AMD K6 Pentium Katmai 8 Pentium Deschutes Pentium Pro Pentium II Transistor count Klamath Pentiumo AMD K5 SA110 R4000 ARM700 ARM 3 AM ARM 6 82046 1972 1970 1978 1976 1990 1988 1986 1998 1996 1994 2010 2008 2006 2004 2002 2016 2014 1974 1992 2000 2012 2018 1980 1982 1984 Data source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count) The data visualization is available at OurWorldinData.org. There you find more visualizations and research on this topic. Licensed under CC-BY-SA by the author Max Roser. Our World in Data Moore's Law The number of transistors on integrated circuit chips (1971-2018) Moore's law describes the empirical regularity that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. This advancement is important as other aspects of technological progress - such as processing speed or the price of electronic products - are linked to Moore's law. 50,000,000,000 o ignon Multi Titan 10,000,000,000 5,000,000,000 1,000,000,000 500,000,000 100,000,000 50,000,000 10,000,000 5,000,000 Intel 80486 1,000,000 500,000 TI Explorer's 32-bit Lisp machine chip Intel 803860 Inte 19600 Motorola 68020 100,000 Intel 80286 Motorola 66000 50,000 Intel 80186 Intel 8086 Intel 8088 OARM 2 SARM 1 Motorola 65C816 6809 10,000 TMS 1000 Zilog 280 RCA 1802 ntel 8085 882 5,000 Intel 8008 Intel 8080 Motorola Mos Technology Intel 4004 6800 1,000 72-core Xeon Phi Centriq 2400 GC2IPU SPARC M7 32-core AMD Epyc IBM 213 Storage Controller Apple A12X Bionic 18-core Xeon Haswell-E5 Tegra Xavier SoC 8 Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx/SCX8180 Xbox One main SoC 61-core Xeon Phi 33 HiSilicon Kirin 980 + Apple A12 Bionic 12-core POWERA- HiSilicon Kirin 710 8-core Xeon Nehalem-EX 10-core Core i7 Broadwell-E Six-core Xeon 7400 Dual-core Itanium 2 Dual-core + GPU Iris Core i7 Broadwell-U Quad-core + GPU GT2 Core i7 Skylake K Pentium D Presler POWERE Quad-core + GPU Core i7 Haswell 2 with Core i7 (Quad) Apple A7 (dual-core ARM64 "mobile SoC") AMD K10 quad-core 2M L3 Itanium 2 Madison 6MO Core 2 Duo Wolfdale Pentium D Smithfield Core 2 Duo Conroe Itanium 2 McKinley Cell Core 2 Duo Wolfdale 3M Pentium 4 Prescott-2M Core 2 Duo Allendale AMD K8 Pentium 4 Prescott Pentium 4 Cedar Mill Pentium 4 Northwoodo Barton Pentium 4 Willamette Pentium III Tualatin Atom Pentium II Mobile Dixono ARM Cortex-A9 AMD K7 Pentium III Coppermine AMD K6-111 AMD K6 Pentium Katmai 8 Pentium Deschutes Pentium Pro Pentium II Transistor count Klamath Pentiumo AMD K5 SA110 R4000 ARM700 ARM 3 AM ARM 6 82046 1972 1970 1978 1976 1990 1988 1986 1998 1996 1994 2010 2008 2006 2004 2002 2016 2014 1974 1992 2000 2012 2018 1980 1982 1984 Data source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count) The data visualization is available at OurWorldinData.org. There you find more visualizations and research on this topic. Licensed under CC-BY-SA by the author Max Roser