Even with devices this small, we couldn't make 13 sextillion of them in 60 years.
A fun fact on the wikipedia page for the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor:
it is the most frequently manufactured device in history, and the total number manufactured from 1960-2018 is 13 sextillion.
That's 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Even with devices this small, we couldn't make 13 sextillion of them in 60 years.
In 2017, it was estimated a billion are made every year.
(from Ken Shirriff's blog)
https://t.co/mz5PQDjYqF
about 25. Not many, but it's a very simple chip.
There's no specs on that specific chip that I can see, but the Tegra Xavier (Which is effectively the Tegra X3) has 7 billion transistors.
So even if the X1 only has 1/7th as many transistors as the Xavier, that's still 70 quadrillion transistors.
That's a rounding error. The CPU/GPU chip is only a small percentage of the number of transistors in the Switch.
One way to make LCDs is with Thin-film transistors, where there's actually a transparent MOSFET layer which each individual subpixel has a transistors.
So it's not the screen.
This is where you build a MOSFET where instead of acting like a switch, the gate electrically isolated, and doesn't easily change.
Basically you can run a current through the mosfet, and based on if it was charged or not, it'll have a different threshold voltage.
And it's taken over the world in the 41 years since it was invented.
You need at minimum one MOSFET for every single bit you store, plus a bunch more to handle addressing and writing and erasing and controlling.
That's not a lot. Your computer or phone probably has at least 4 times that much.
And Nintendo has sold 70 million of those.
More from foone
Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.
it's like a classic twilight zone episode.
in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.
they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town
the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.
— Star Trek Minus Context (@NoContextTrek) January 28, 2021
it's like a classic twilight zone episode.
in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.
they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town
the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.
