ELI5, if it takes nearly thirty years to count to a billion, one second at a time, how are humans able design complex CPUs and Graphics cards containing multiple billions of transistors?

Question

ELI5, if it takes nearly thirty years to count to a billion, one second at a time, how are humans able design complex CPUs and Graphics cards containing multiple billions of transistors?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

Design is done at a higher level than traces and gates, there are memory modules and logic modules composed of many many transistors themselves, and these can be moved around on the chip layout as a single structure.

We’re also not counting the transistors one second at a time; the clock in a modern processor operates at multiple Gigahertz. It can effectively count to a billion in less than a second.