how is it possible for computer chips to have billions of transistors?

Question

Aren’t transistors physical things? How is it possible to manufacture billions, especially within the small size of a computer chip?

I saw the Apple m2 chip has 20 billion transistors – it just seems incomprehensible that that many can be manufactured.. they could be microscopic, but 20 billion is still an absurd number

In: 2283

Answer 1

Transistors used to be an actual thing. If you took the back off a 1970s transistor radio you could count them. Eat one was about the size of a q-tip

Then we figured out how to make the functional equivalent of transistors by etching patterns into layers of silicon. Since then we’ve gotten very good at doing that at microscopic sizes.

So I might argue that a modern chip doesn’t contain transistors, but it contains millions of transistor equivalent silicon circuits.