I’m writing a little blurb about integrated circuits - their history, modern usage, etc. etc. I want to include a line that says something like “A microwave may use only one integrated circuit, whereas a modern PC typically includes <number> of integrated circuits.”
What is that number? Hundreds? Thousands? Ten? Hell, I wouldn’t know an IC if it bit my elbow.
Try “at most a dozen” (and that’s not counting the memory ICs which can vary greatly in number based on configuration).
Umm, I was referring to the motherboard itself. Various things connected to it can each have 1 to tens of ICs. It’s really hard to predict their number given the variability of what could be connected and their design. A video card can vary quite a bit based on its power.
Having a lot of ICs is a sign of bad design. The fewer the better. A motherboard with 100 ICs would have no room for card slots, etc.
Thanks, ftg. How about something like “whereas a modern PC typically includes a dozen or more integrated circuits.”
I just looked inside my Pentium 4 PC and counted about 14 ICs on the motherboard alone. (I think know the difference between ICs, voltage regulators and resistor networks.) And my 256MB memory module is made up of 16 chips. Also each drive has its own control circuit made up of at least a few ICs. So I guess the answer is “dozens.”
More ICs doesn’t always mean more functionality or complexity. Newer ICs are more highly integrated. And one custom-designed or programmable chip can do the work of a hundred off-the-shelf ICs.
In my fairly basic PC, I count twenty-four chips on my motherboard, eight memory chips and another 25 on the rest of the boards. I’d guess that the floppy drive, CD drive and hard drive have about five chips each, and there might be a few on the power supply, making a rough total of about sixty-five ICs.
I used to have a Timex Sinclair computer with a grand total of 4 ICs, back in the 1980’s. But it’s hardly typical.
The number of ICs in a typical PC has actually decreased over the years. There was a time when a basic IBM PC-clone computer might contain up to 100 fairly small ICs. Lately manufacturers have been working on combining more and more functionality in each chip, taking logic tasks that might have been combined among dozens of chips and making them into one large custom part.
A microwave is just a magnetron which generates the radio waves, a waveguide (aka a tube for the radio waves to travel down) and a box where the radio waves end up where they get absorbed by your food. It doesn’t need an IC at all. It used to be the cheaper ones used mechanical timers. Now microcontrollers have gotten so cheap that the cost isn’t so much an issue.
A PC by comparison has one very powerful processor, and usually a lot of other processors slaved to it like the hard drive controller, keybaord controller, etc. The core of a PC motherboard is just a couple of chips though. All of the interface chips that used to be seperate components are integrated into very large ICs. The chip count on an XT is a lot higher than the chip count on a modern motherboard, and the modern motherboard has most of the things that were on seperate cards back then integrated on it as well.
Some other thoughts off the top of my head about ICs:
A modern $500 desktop computer has the same power as a supercomputer costing millionsof dollars from a couple of decades ago.
The typical automobile produced today has a more powerful computer than the one that took the astronauts to the moon.
Tiny microcontrollers (like the ones in your coffee pot and microwave oven) are often doing jobs that used to be done by old fashioned relay control circuits a couple of decades ago. A single microcontroller has the equivalent of several thousand relays in it.
Integrated circuits are “grown.” They are made of a silicon crystal structure which is “doped” with certain types of impurities as it grows (crystalizes) to make the various different types of transistors, diodes, etc.
Athena, a better measure of complexity than number of ICs would be number of transistors. This page on How Microprocessors Work gives the number of transistors on a series of Intel CPUs. The RAM would also have a significant number of transistors, but [WAG alert] the rest of the chips combined probably don’t come close in number of transistors[/alert]. Maybe you could find the number of transistors in some other appliance for comparison.
Did some IC counting last night, some of my MBs with onboard video, sound, do get up to around 14-15 (counting CPU but not memory). Had a CD-ROM drive open also so I checked it: had 12.
Once again, the SDMB has proven to be the best research aid out there. Thanks to everyone for their input.
engineer_comp_geek thanks for the “bites”. I’ll probably incorporate the thing about ICs being ‘grown’ into this document. Also, I really like the thing about the average car having a more powerful computer than the one that brought us to the moon. I’ll work that into this book somewhere or other!
ZenBeam, thanks for the info! I’m doing a document specifically on ICs, so I’ll probably stick to that subject, but I’ll keep the transistor thing in mind.
And thanks to everyone who provided me with IC counts. I feel a little guilty; I could have opened up a computer here and counted 'em. Lazy me makes the teeming millions do it instead, though!
Did anyone count the number of crystal controlled oscillators in their PCs?
Wrong, a modern high end graphics card has more than twice the amount of transistors than a modern high end CPU.