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by lnx01 799 days ago
The Apple A8X, found in the iPad Air 2, contains about 3 billion transistors. (This is comparable to the number of transistors in modern desktop computer CPUs as well.) At the scale of the MOnSter 6502, that would take about 885,000 square feet (over 20 acres or 8 hectares) — an area about 940 ft (286 m) square.
2 comments

The Apple A8X is 10 years old.

The current iPhone processor (Apple A17) contains 19 billion transistors. So now we have 126 acres in a pocket.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A17

I wonder how slow it would have to run and how many kilowatts it would use.
It takes about a full microsecond for a signal to go from one edge of the "wafer" to the other, so that constrains your cycle time considerably.