This itty bitty size, while impressive, makes the creation of a thinking rock (known as a CPU) all the more mysterious. At this size, you couldn’t actually see them with an optical microscope! Incredibly, the size of the transistors in the most modern thinking rocks has gotten even smaller. In 2014 you could buy a thinking rock packed full of transistors that were 400 silicon atoms (~80 nanometers) long. Let me tell you, these transistors are veeery small. So, how do you stuff two billion transistors inside a square that fits in the palm of your hand? The answer is pretty obvious: to stuff an unfathomable number of objects into a small space, you just make the objects in question unfathomably small. With that in mind, the fact that this same paper stacked two billion times is taller than 112 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other should hopefully drive home the magnitude of two billion. If I stacked 100 pieces of this paper, the resulting pile would only be 5 centimeters or 1.97 inches tall. I want to stress that this printer paper is the thinnest stuff that you can buy. Everests on top of each other, and it still wouldn’t be as tall as this stack of paper! It’s quite literally halfway to space! Put another way, you could stack 5 and a half Mt. That’s 4.3 times taller than the maximum height commercial planes fly at. If I were to assemble a stack of two billion pieces of the thinnest printer paper I could find, the resulting tower reaches 50 kilometers or 31.07 miles into the air. So, let’s make it a little more tangible. Written out, two billion is 2,000,000,000 – even after writing out all nine of those zeros, the concept is still abstract. The semantics of saying “two billion” obfuscates the magnitude of the number. Numbers at this magnitude are really hard to fathom. A short aside on size and the thinking rockĭepending on the device you’re reading this post on, your thinking rock has around one to two billion (or more) transistors stuffed inside it. Modern thinking rocks have fancy tricks to make these and other more advanced mathematical operations go faster, but essentially all a thinking rock does is very speedy addition all day. division is the count of subtracting the same number multiple times.subtraction is adding a negative number to a positive.multiplication is just adding the same number multiple times. These switches are combined in clever ways that, when powered by the aforementioned lightning (electricity), allow the rock to remember small amounts of information and to do addition. What is a thinking rock exactlyĪt its most basic level, a thinking rock is comprised of switches – called transistors – and wires that connect these switches together. If so, you’re in luck! Today we’re going to explore how the thinking rocks that power your computer are created. A cursory count puts the number of these rocks thinking on a daily basis north of a billion! With so many thinking rocks around, perhaps you’ve idly wondered how exactly a flattened rock stuffed chockfull of lightning gets made. Most people you know probably have at least one or two thinking rocks in their possession. You use a thinking rock to write a text, browse the internet, and play music. There are a lot of thinking rocks in use today. Not to oversimplify: first you have to flatten the rock and put lightning inside 3/4/17)Ī word of caution: if the rock thinks too hard it will become hot enough to boil 6/17/20) There is an excellent tuple of tweets by that go something like this:Ī CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into 3/4/17)
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