The transistor 70th anniversary
Bernard Goossens · 2017
In 1947, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the transistor. Ten years later, the first integrated circuit was built and in 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded the Intel company. Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a die would double every year. In 1975, four years after the introduction of the first microprocessor, he updated his prediction, saying that the growth would then slow down to a doubling every two years. Such a growth rate leads to multiply the number of transistors by 1000 every 20 years. The first microprocessor had 2300 transistors in 1971. In 1991, Intel launched the 486SX with 1.2M transistors and in 2011, the Sandy Bridge processors reached 500M transistors. Whhat did we do with this transistor budget? If the Moore's law continues for another 20 years, in 2037, we should reach 1 Trillion transistors. WThat will we do with them? These are the questions we will address in the presentation, looking at microarchitectural techniques to increase performance such as pipelining, superscalar and out-of-order execution, multiple core and manvcore designs.