When Moore wrote his seminal article, a single transistor spanned the width of a fibre of cotton and cost eight dollars in today’s prices. Now, by contrast, billions of transistors can be squeezed onto a chip the size of a fingernail, with a single human hair 10,000 times thicker than Intel’s next generation of products. And the cost per unit? That’s plummeted too, falling to a tiny fraction of a cent. So while you’ll often hear clichés of how modern smartphones are more powerful than the computers used for NASA’s Apollo missions, even that fails to convey how dramatically transistors have transformed over the last few decades.
A more useful comparison can be found between the supercomputer ASCI Red and the PlayStation family of games consoles. The former, built by the US government in 1996, was the first machine able to process a teraflop – a trillion floating-point calculations per second. Costing \$55 million and measuring the size of a tennis court, its purpose was to predict and model nuclear explosions, something it did with ease as it remained the world’s fastest computer until the turn of the millennium – staying in use until as recently as 2005. And yet just one year later, the same processing power was available to consumers in a PlayStation 3, a games console available for as little as \$600. The PlayStation 4, released in 2013, was almost twice as powerful as both its predecessor and ASCI Red. Coming in at \$400 it cost 1/100,000th of the world’s leading supercomputer only two decades earlier.
The Three Disruptions
43