[bem94]

I'd assume that by "moving parts" they mean transistors. Ofcourse this is somewhat confusing to people who know how computers are composed of transistors and what transistors are. But if you just want to convey to the lay person the complexity of the component, I'd say it's a reasonable way to do it.

[dpark]

> I'd say it's a reasonable way to do it.

No, it's a terrible way to do it. It's fundamentally wrong. It's not even reasonable metaphorically. It's like trying to explain the automobile to a 17th century pirate and saying it's a horse with 4 sails.

[mcbits]

I could imagine playing the Chinese whisper/telephone game starting with "active components" and getting to "moving parts" pretty quickly.

[geoah]

A modern consumer CPU has over 500m transistors, so that number is pretty low for a transistor count.

[WoodenChair]

>A modern consumer CPU has over 500m transistors

Try 10 billion

https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/30/apple-announces-a12x-with...

[dkfellows]

It really depends on whether you include the memory in that count, as memory uses masses of transistors without being very interesting as most of those transistors spend their time just sitting there in a stable state. It's the transistor count (more properly, the gate count; gates can be thought of as multiple transistors fused together, yet they're truly a single thing in terms of manufacturing and layout) in the computational parts of the processor that is really interesting.

SpiNNaker is built using old ARM968 cores on an ancient process (because that was cheap, for various reasons). The SpiNNaker2 hardware (under design; I can't remember if it is next year or the one after when it is finalized) will be on a modern process that will let us pack ten times as many cores on per chip, with those cores being quite a lot more powerful. Which isn't bad; we're not a commercial outfit here…

[xxs]

that's some core2 stuff of 2008-2010