Transistors and Breakthroughs

Just clarifying some stuff from today - the valves (thermionic devices) we saw are now replaced by  semiconductors (solid state devices) - one of the most recent Radeon graphic cards  has a Graphics Processing Unit  (GPU)  with 4.3 billion transistors in ~350 square millimetres. That is approaching 12 million transistors per square millimetre.

If that GPU was made out of the smallest valves we saw in class today it would cover an area of about 1 square kilometre.

And  - because I want to keep pushing you into a Science based career (photonics, quantum computing, fusion power...) here are the links to those articles we discussed today:

Red photons to yellow photon for solar cells here

The universe sized computer made of 300 atoms here

And a comic (LOL-worthy, for me anyway) about quantum computing (from here originally)