Computing · Transistor Count

Moore’s Law

Fifty-five years of doubling, and the lead has changed hands twice.

• 2,300 → 336B transistors, 1971–2026
• Doubling every ~2 years, 2.3 most recently
• Intel CPUs → AMD EPYC → Nvidia GPUs
• Leading-edge parts, not annual max

Intel’s 4004 carried 2,300 transistors in 1971, six years after Gordon Moore first described the trend. Nvidia’s Rubin carries 146 million times as many in 2026, and the doubling time has barely varied: two years to 2000, two years since, 2.3 years across 2020–2026. What has changed is who was setting it. Intel CPUs hold every point from the 4004 through the multi-core era. Then frequency scaling hit power limits and the frontier of integration passed to massively parallel silicon: AMD’s EPYC takes 2017, and Nvidia’s AI accelerators every point after. Blackwell packs 208 billion transistors on TSMC’s custom 4 nm-class 4NP process; Rubin puts 336 billion on a reported 3 nm-class node Nvidia has not named.

These are representative leading-edge parts, not strictly the single highest-count chip shipped in each year; some specialty processors carried more, but the curve follows the mainstream frontier. The two earliest points no longer match the table they came from: Wikipedia now gives the 4004 2,250 and the 8080 6,000, where this curve plots 2,300 and 4,500. The 8080’s 4,500 is Intel’s own datasheet count, and the table cites nothing for either revision, so both older figures stand until a first-party source displaces them.

Source: Wikipedia: transistor-count list; Intel datasheet for the 8080

Download the data: moores_law.csv · moores_law.json

All curves · The chart is drawn in your browser and needs JavaScript. Every number it plots is in the table above.