Did you ever wonder how it is that today you can buy a handheld smartphone that's got way more computing capacity in it than all of NASA used to land man on the moon? More than IBM used to beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov at chess? And all for £150 or so for a basic model?
The answer is that computing technology - processors, memory and storage - is getting exponentially smaller, faster, better and cheaper over time. It's so cheap that we can be frivolous with it today in fact. Flappy Birds, SnapChat, Tinder, kitten memes and terrabytes of selfies.
The only reason this is possible is that somewhere, in some research and development lab of a computer components manufacturer, boffins are slaving away to make the components of your phones and computers smaller, faster, better and cheaper.
Take processors, for example, the brains of your phone and computer. What makes them keep getting faster, smaller, and consuming less power than those of yesteryear is principally down to the fact that each generation is manufactured to be smaller than the last. This means that today's processors can either be smaller and use less energy, or cram more transistors in than the last generation of processors - or both.
Take this, somewhat elderly, graph showing how many transistors are crammed onto today's processors compared to those in 1971:
That's possible because the size of the transistors - the zero / one switches at the heart of any processor - can now be manufactured in mind blowingly small sizes. The sorts of sizes we're talking about here are tiny, measured in nanometers, which are equal to one billionth of a metre ( 0.000000001 m).
The answer is that computing technology - processors, memory and storage - is getting exponentially smaller, faster, better and cheaper over time. It's so cheap that we can be frivolous with it today in fact. Flappy Birds, SnapChat, Tinder, kitten memes and terrabytes of selfies.
The only reason this is possible is that somewhere, in some research and development lab of a computer components manufacturer, boffins are slaving away to make the components of your phones and computers smaller, faster, better and cheaper.
Take processors, for example, the brains of your phone and computer. What makes them keep getting faster, smaller, and consuming less power than those of yesteryear is principally down to the fact that each generation is manufactured to be smaller than the last. This means that today's processors can either be smaller and use less energy, or cram more transistors in than the last generation of processors - or both.
Take this, somewhat elderly, graph showing how many transistors are crammed onto today's processors compared to those in 1971:
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| Source: go-rbcs.com |
As recently as the year 2000, transistors were 130nm in size, which is still pretty small. But that's nothing, we'll soon be mass manufacturing transistors less than 10nm in size, whilst 7nm transistors have already been demonstrated in a lab. That's an incredible reduction in component size:
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| Source: qph.is.quoracdn.net |
Those boffins keep on breaking down technical barriers preventing progress in building things at unfathomably small sizes, and processors keep getting smaller, faster, better and cheaper as a result.
That's why your next phone will be able to load Flappy Birds that bit quicker than your last phone.
That's why your next phone will be able to load Flappy Birds that bit quicker than your last phone.
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