Many of you readers would agree with me that technology is really a revolution. It has changed SO much in the last few years. Take storage for example. In 1991, (26 years ago), a hard drive (Photo on the right) held a grand total of 1 GB. Nowadays, you can get a 10 TB drive (10,000 times more data can be stored) that's half the physical size of the 1GB Drive!
Hard drives are really not that interesting, so I have another example. 70 years ago, in 1947 the first transistor was invented. Transistors are electronic components that direct the flow of electricity. They run your computer, router, microwave, tv, pretty much anything that is more complicated than a lamp. In 1947, a transistor looked like the big clear thing on the top left. Of course one of those isn't in your microwave. The transistor on the bottom right is a modern day version of what the giant transistor was in 1947. One of the transistors on the left would cost about 25 cents today. What about transistors in computers? Is my computer filled with little black components with three wires sticking out? Well, no. The device on the right is a modern-day CPU (Central Processing Unit) In fact this is the one that is in my computer right now. This package, while larger than the single transistor on the right, this component has 1.75 Billion transistors inside! This chip costs around $300, but the number of transistors inside is insane. If you're willing to pay a little (a lot) more, $1700 to be exact, you can purchase the Intel 6950x, a CPU with a whopping 3.4 Billion transistors!
So what? Why does it matter how many odd-looking clear plastic things are in a computer? Why does it matter that they are smaller now? The answer is speed. My old computer had 1.3 Billion transistors, and while not even half a billion might not seem like a huge difference, the new machine feels so much faster. And it really is! In terms of raw speed, measured in Gigahertz (The more GHZ the better) the 0.45 transistor difference makes my current computer 145% faster than the old one. Transistor count doesn't mean everything however, my CPU beats the $1700 one by 25% in raw speed.
Now on to how the technology revolution has affected me. One example of the technology revolution is again, my computer. The 1.3 Billion transistor CPU came out in 2013. I built my current one over winter break, 6 (almost 7) years difference, and the chip is 145% faster? Thats amazing! (Both computers cost roughly the same at the time when I got them) The speed has changed so much in the span of just a few years! Another example of something that has changed a ton in the last few years, is cell phones. The first iPhone was released in 2007. Apple doesn't really like to tell anyone how fast their products are, aside from the possibly false claims about their products being "Light years ahead" (Check out Kamran's article for more on that) They really don't give me a lot of technical details that I can actually compare to their newer devices. One thing that they do give us is the storage capacity. The first iphone came in 4, 8, and 16gb versions. The newest iPhone comes in 32, 128, and 256gb options. If you don't have a reference of what a gb can actually hold, A 2 hour movie or or 345 songs is about 1.5gb.
I sure hope that technology keeps improving as fast as it has, because I sure am excited when the day comes where I can hold 10 Billion transistors in my hand.
