Thirty doublings make a factor of a billion, and that is precisely the distance from the 2,300 transistors on the Intel 4004 of 1971 to the tens of billions on a chip today. Because exponential growth on a linear axis simply shoots off the page, the vertical axis is drawn logarithmically, where a doubling every two years shows up as a nearly straight line. But no exponential runs forever: transistors are down to a few nanometres, a few dozen atoms across, and the doubling beat is slowing.
Thirty doublings make a factor of a billion, and that is precisely the distance from the 2,300 transistors on the Intel 4004 of 1971 to the tens of billions on a chip today. Because exponential growth on a linear axis simply shoots off the page, the vertical axis is drawn logarithmically, where a doubling every two years shows up as a nearly straight line. But no exponential runs forever: transistors are down to a few nanometres, a few dozen atoms across, and the doubling beat is slowing.
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