Of transistors and grains of rice
The June 19, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek had a supplement section on innovation. On page 27, they noted the following:
Last year, human beings produced more transistors (and at a lower cost) than they did grains of rice.Really? If that is true, then I find that to be amazing! I would never have guessed it.
Labels: amazing
posted by Thomas R. Stone @ 10:45 PM
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A Pentium 840 processor has 230 million or so transistors. SDRAM has at least 1 transistor per bit plus those needed for addressing, cycling, pipelineing, etc. That means a 512MB SDRAM DIMM has at least 4 trillion transistors. A pound of rice is approx 29,000 grains (http://www.producersrice.com/rice/facts.html). So it just processor and memory a modern pentium computer with 512MB of ram has as many transistors as grains of rice in 145,862 pounds of rice (or 72 tons of rice). That's a lot of rice for $400 :)
Oops, sorry one 512MB SDRAM chip has at least 4 billion, not trillion. But the math still works, I just fat fingered the name for 1 with 9 zeros...
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