A modern micro processor has atleast 100 million transistors. The Core i7 920 (D0 stepping) has approximately 781 million transistors.
on the order of a billion
Size, power, cost, and speed... The size of a CPU with individual transistors could easily require a room full of electronics, whereas a modern CPU chip is smaller than a small coin. The power of a CPU with individual transistors could easily be in the kilowatt or hundreds of kilowatts range, requiring specialized power systems, whereas a modern CPU chip only requires 25 to 100 watts per core. (At full load.) The cost of a CPU with individual transistors could easily be in the millions of dollars, whereas the modern CPU chip might only be a few hundred dollars. The speed of a CPU with individual transistors is limited by the length of the conductors. The speed of light is about one foot per nanosecond. (3 x 108 m/s divided by 1 x 109 ns/s) If you have a large, room size CPU, there are physical limits on how fast it can go. A modern CPU chip can easily run in the GHz range, an impossible feat for a room sized CPU.
Yes it is!
A modern micro processor has atleast 100 million transistors.
A CPU works off of DC voltage. If you monitor the current draw of a CPU, it will likely not be DC, since a modern CPU is a CMOS design, current is only drawn when transistors are switched (ignoring the small leakage current). This is why overclocking (forcing the transistors to switch faster) can cause the CPU to overheat, and why "power save" mode on a laptop sometimes slows down the processor speed.
Billions.
There are no valves in a modern computer. If by valves you mean vacuum tubes, the equivalent is a transistor. Modern CPUs have many transistors/gates on their dies. The SandyBridge i7, a near-top end general purpose computer COU can have 2.2 billon transistor elements on the CPU die. Of course there are many more transistors incorporated in the logic chips, controllers and video cards in a computer as well.
As of the end of 2016, high end multicore microprocessors have from 3,000,000,000 to 8,000,000,000 transistors. But there are plenty of other medium range microprocessors and microcontrollers with much fewer transistors being manufactured.
An 18-core Xeon Haswell-E5 has 5,560,000,000 transistors.
The modern CPU (typically inside a microprocessor IC) is built of billions of transistors (typically complementary MOSFETs). The CPUs of the late 1960s were built of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of transistors inside several hundred MSI ICs (typical silicon NPN BJTs). The CPUs of the late 1950s to early 1960s were built of thousands to tens of thousands of discrete transistors (typically germanium BJTs, gradually transitioning silicon BJTs). The CPUs of the early 1950s did not use transistors, they were built of hundreds to tens of thousands of vacuum tubes.
The CPU is housed on a silicon chip that contains millions of switches and circuits. It has millions of Transistors