[CalChris]

Your dates sound about right. The eighties. Mead+Conway was just out and fabs of a certain size became accessible. The question then was what could you do with these fabs and transistor budgets? Berkeley+Stanford did RISC+MIPS. Clark did the Geometry Engine at Stanford+SGI.

So what could you do with X transistors? But then X became stupid large. The 68000 (1979) had 40,000 transistors. Now the Apple A10 has 3.3-billion transistors. So you can imagine that architectural design assumptions dating from 1980 will need to be revisited.

[rwallace]

> The 68000 (1979) had 40,000 transistors.

Where did you get that figure? I'm curious because the figure I've seen tossed around is 68,000 transistors (the story going that this is where the model number came from).

[CalChris]

It's much more likely (like infinitely more likely) that the 68000 name stems from the earlier 6800 8-bit product line. There's nothing definitive saying 68,000 transistors and I've read both 40,000 and 68,000. I believe that 68,000 was just marketing. FWIW, Motorola also employed 68,000 people in 1980 (approximately):

https://www.motorolasolutions.com/content/dam/msi/docs/en-xw...

The Geometry Engine had 40,000.

https://books.google.com/books?id=gD4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA17&dq=68...