Transistor count

The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device (typically on a single substrate or "chip"). It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity (although the majority of transistors in modern microprocessors are contained in the cache memories, which consist mostly of the same memory cell circuits replicated many times). The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observed that the transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a chip, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is: a better indication of this is the transistor density (the ratio of a chip's transistor count to its area). the highest transistor count in flash memory was Micron's 2 terabyte (3D-stacked) 16-die, 232-layer V-NAND flash memory chip, with 5.3 trillion floating-gate MOSFETs (3 bits per transistor). The highest transistor count in a single chip processor is that of the deep learning processor Wafer Scale Engine 2 by Cerebras. It has 2.6 trillion MOSFETs in 84 exposed fields (dies) on a wafer, manufactured using TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process. As of 2023 highest transistor count GPU is AMD's MI300X, built on TSMC's N5 process and totalling 153 billion MOSFETs. The highest transistor count in a consumer microprocessor is 134 billion transistors, in Apple's ARM-based dual-die M2 Ultra system on a chip, which is fabricated using TSMC's 5 nm semiconductor manufacturing process. In terms of computer systems that consist of numerous integrated circuits, the supercomputer with the highest transistor count was the Chinese-designed Sunway TaihuLight, which has for all CPUs/nodes combined "about 400 trillion transistors in the processing part of the hardware" and "the DRAM includes about 12 quadrillion transistors, and that's about 97 percent of all the transistors." To compare, the smallest computer, dwarfed by a grain of rice, had of the order of 100,000 transistors.