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Intel Shipped 1 Billionth Computer Chip
murat submitted linkage to a simple little story that proclaims that Intel has recently shipped
it's One Billionth Chip. Quite an impressive accomplishment... it took them 25 years to reach the billions, but they estimate that they will hit 2 billion by only 2007.
...which chip was it? Centrino, P4 or Xeon?
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Call them the McDonalds of the chip world.
Soon, their slogan will be "Billions and Billions of chips shipped" (then maybe McDonalds could sue Intel for trademark infringment! woo!)
My question is how many of those chips are stil actually being used today? huh? How many of those 8086 chips are in use today? (maybe NASA still uses a few, eh?)
And of course, my final question: Sure, 1 billion chips.. but how many transistors have you shipped on those 1 billion chips?
The article is talking about the billionth x86 chip, not just the billionth chip of any kind. If you included ALL the IC chips that Intel has made since being founded, the number would be closer to 10 billion I would predict.
It sounds like this is actually the billionth *CPU* from Intel, not the billionth chip. Intel produces quite a lot of other silicon in addition to the CPUs it is best known for, and I suspect that Intel actually passed the billion *chip* mark many years ago.
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That's more than 1 per second since 1 billion seconds is almost 32 years.
McDonalds opened in the Midwest (Des Plaines, IL, acutally) in 1955.
Their 50 billionth hamburger was served in New York city in or around 1984.
That's ~30 years, or an average of 1 2/3 billion per year.
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The 8088 was actually released before the 8086, but as the article states the 8086 was developed first.
No, the 8086 did come out first. It had a full 16 bit bus. The 8088 came out later with an 8 bit bus (I think the memory bus, but I am not sure about that) because manufactures were finding it was to expensive to make motherboards based on the 16 bit bus.
I wonder what the mean clock speed of those ::with pinky to chin:: 1 billion chips is?
# fuser -v
#
Just imagine all of the pollution and garbage that had to be produced for those billion chips...
This site actually has a lot of good info on the early microprocessors, complete with pictures. They've even got info and pictures of the 4004! :)
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Remember TI ships more chips each year than Frito Lay! Yeah they aren't as sexy or nearly as high margin as x86 cpu's but they are the little microcontrollers that make computers basically ubiquotous in our world.
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I wonder what fraction of these one billion have already been obsoleted and are now sitting in landfills?
Given Moore's Law, I'll bet it's a high share.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Thus,
.536*141.6e9/173e6 dollars. That works out to $438.67 Current list prices for the Intel Pentium III, 3.06 GHz, range from $365-$759.99, with an average price listing of $459.53.
13139006 * e^(.17329 * x)
Where x is in years is the cumulative output of Intel.
This allows us to calculate with high accuracy the size of Intel's production line, a secret coveted by industry insiders. Differentiating, we have:
2276816 * e^(.17329 * x)
Thus, Intel currently has 173 million processors in various production stages.
This allows us to calculate another secret, coveted by all geeks - the true value of an Intel CPU.
Intel's current market capitalization is 141.6 billion US$. Based on their Q1 2003 quarterly report, 53.6% of their cost of production (including R&D and other expenses) goes into the Intel Architecture business unit.
If we know the size of the production line, the current valuation, and the percentage dedicated to CPU production, we can compute an average valuation for an Intel CPU.
Each current issue Intel CPU should be worth, on average
Conclusion - for every current release Intel CPU you buy, on average you are being ripped off by about $20.86, about 4.75% the value of the product. That is less than sales tax, and doesn't seem like the work of a greed hungry power monster.
Any similar statistics on Microsoft's product valuation would be highly interesting.
I read somewhere that humans have manufactured more transistors than anything else. Makes sense, especially when you think of how many went into just these billion intel x86s.