How many transistors would you find in a modern laptop?

Answer 1

A laptop today in mid-2015 typically has about 200 billion transistors in it - this includes the TFT LCD screen, CPU, RAM (memory) and many ASIC and controller chips. To put this in perspective, if today's laptop were made with the 1950s ENIAC vacuum tube ('valve') technology, it would require a space of more than 8.8 billion square feet (94,280 feet on a side. That's 17.8 miles on a side - or 28.5 km per side). This could not be done. A 17 x 17 mile square electronic device built using vacuum tube technology would require more electrical power than all the electrical power plants in the United States could produce, to run it.

This estimate is based on the fact that the ENIAC computer had about 18,000 vacuum tubes and required 800 square feet of floor space.

Now one can see why we are truly living in a paradigm shift; why there's now serious talk about transhumanism and enhanced, immortal man-machine hybrid beings.

(The United States is used as an example because that is where the ENIAC computer was designed, built and operated.)

Answer 2

Very hard to estimate and depends on features. But here is a rough guestimate:

• multicore microprocessor - 4 billion to 10 billion transistors
• microprocessor support chips - 2 billion transistors
• 4 gigabyte DRAM - slightly more than 4 billion transistors
• graphics & video processors plus screen - 6 billion to 30 billion transistors
• various special purpose I/O chips - roughly 500 million transistors
• power supply - a few hundred to a few thousand transistors
• etc.

So the total number of transistors could be somewhere between 16.5 billion to 46.5 billion transistors in a laptop. And you get all that for maybe $1000, when top end mainframe computers of the 1960s rarely had more than a few million transistors and easily cost more than $5,000,000 while also requiring significant amounts of air conditioning to keep them cool enough to work.