The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device (typically on a single substrate or silicon die). It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity (although the majority of transistors in modern microprocessors are contained in 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 observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a die, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is. A better indication of this is transistor density which is the ratio of a device's transistor count to its die area.
Records , the highest transistor count in flash memory is Micron's 2terabyte (3D-stacked) 16-die, 232-layer V-NAND flash memory chip, with 5.3trillion floating-gate MOSFETs (3bits 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 2.6trillion MOSFETs in 84 exposed fields (dies) on a wafer, manufactured using TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process.
, the GPU with the highest transistor count is Nvidia's Rubin accelerator, built on TSMC's custom N3P process node and totaling 336 billion MOSFETs.
The highest transistor count in a consumer microprocessor is 184billion transistors, in Apple's ARM-based dual-die M3 Ultra SoC, which is fabricated using TSMC's 3 nm semiconductor manufacturing process.
Year Component Name Number ofMOSFETs (billion) Remarks 2022 Flash memory Micron's V-NAND module 5300 stacked package of sixteen 232-layer 3D NAND dies 2020 any processor Wafer Scale Engine 2 2600 wafer-scale design of 84 exposed fields (dies) 2026 GPU Nvidia Rubin 336 Uses two reticle limit dies and two I/O dies, joined and acting as a single large monolithic piece of silicon 2025 Microprocessor (consumer) Apple M3 Ultra 184 SoC using two dies joined with a high-speed bridge
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 on the order of 100,000 transistors. Early experimental solid-state computers had as few as 130 transistors but used large amounts of diode logic. The first carbon nanotube computer had 178 transistors and was a 1-bit one-instruction set computer, while a later one is 16-bit (its instruction set is 32-bit RISC-V though).
Ionic transistor chips ("water-based" analog limited processor), have up to hundreds of such transistors.
Estimates of the total numbers of transistors manufactured: Up to 2014: Up to 2018:
Transistor count
Microprocessors
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit. It is a multi-purpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and provides results as output.
The development of MOS integrated circuit technology in the 1960s led to the development of the first microprocessors. The 20-bit MP944, developed by Garrett AiResearch for the U.S. Navy's F-14 Tomcat fighter in 1970, is considered by its designer Ray Holt to be the first microprocessor. It was a multi-chip microprocessor, fabricated on six MOS chips. However, it was classified by the Navy until 1998. The 4-bit Intel 4004, released in 1971, was the first single-chip microprocessor.
Modern microprocessors typically include on-chip cache memories. The number of transistors used for these cache memories typically far exceeds the number of transistors used to implement the logic of the microprocessor (that is, excluding the cache). For example, the last DEC Alpha chip uses 90% of its transistors for cache.
Processor Transistor count Year Designer Process(nm) Area (mm2) Transistordensity(tr./mm2)MP944 (20-bit, 6-chip, 28 chips total)74,442 (5,360 excl. ROM & RAM)1970Garrett AiResearchIntel 4004 (4-bit, 16-pin)2,250 1971Intel10,000 nm12 mm2188TMX 1795 (8-bit, 24-pin)3,078Ken Shirriff. "The Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the (almost) first, forgotten microprocessor". 2015.1971Texas Instruments 30.64 mm2 100.5Intel 8008 (8-bit, 18-pin)3,5001972Intel10,000 nm14 mm2250NEC μCOM-4 (4-bit, 42-pin) 2,5001973NEC7,500 nmToshiba TLCS-12 (12-bit) 11,000+1973Toshiba6,000 nm32.45 mm2340+Intel 4040 (4-bit, 16-pin)3,0001974Intel10,000 nm12 mm2250Motorola 6800 (8-bit, 40-pin)4,1001974Motorola6,000 nm16 mm2256Intel 8080 (8-bit, 40-pin)6,000 1974Intel6,000 nm20 mm2300TMS 1000 (4-bit, 28-pin)8,0001974Texas Instruments8,000 nm11 mm2730HP Nanoprocessor (8-bit, 40-pin)4,639Ken Shirriff. "Inside the HP Nanoprocessor: a high-speed processor that can't even add". 2020.