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Pop Quiz: what is the most manufactured "machine" in human history?

amirm

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In the age of quick google searches, it is hard to ask question that don't have easy answers. But this may be a good one. And with a hopefully educational answer :).

So here it is: what is the most manufactured "machine" in human history?

I put "machine" in quotation meaning the answer is not literal in that sense. It is something that is man made and performs a function.

So google away or guess.
 

iridium

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lever or inclined plane; pulley coming in 3rd [unless you consider the wheel a manufactured machine]. Some may say an inclined plane is not a manufactured machine and true some are in nature, BUT every thread of every bolt and screw is an inclined plane.

iridium.
 

Sal1950

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Wheel
 

RayDunzl

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Nail.
 

RayDunzl

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No.

Transistor (in all its forms).
 
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amirm

amirm

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No.

Transistor (in all its forms).
OK, fess up. How did you guess it? :)

The answer is actually a specific type of transistor. Namely MOSFET which is the building blocks digital logic circuits. A CPU which is a massive version of that has 1 to 3 billion transistor in a today's CPU in a computer or phone/tablet. Now multiply that by the number of such devices alone sold and it becomes staggering.

MOSFET's beauty here is its power efficiency. The tiniest amount of current on its input causes its output to change. Regular transistors require much more current and hence the reason they are not used.

fig7_1_1.gif


There you have it. Now you can be the bell of the ball in the next office party.
 

RayDunzl

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OK, fess up. How did you guess it?

Because I'm a wild and crazy guy.

Well, anything with "billions" in its description of a single unit used to get my attention.

But now, I think memory has outstripped the CPU count.

I remember Intel boasting the first billion transistor CPU, and more recently I've cogitated Micro SD Flash drives... I have a 64G, which must have about 64 x 8 storage cells, plus support circuits, so dats a lotta little parts.

Here's a 2TB thumb drive with (I suppose) more transistors (of some sort) than stars in the Milky Way AND Andromeda:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820242416&ignorebbr=1&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC-_-pla-_-Memory+(USB+Flash+Drive)-_-N82E16820242416&gclid=CPjs74ia9dMCFVKBswodnRQOTQ&gclsrc=aw.ds

My next guess was going to be drugs, if counting on the molecular level.
 
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Ron Party

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Are you sure it isn't duct tape? Or post-it notes? :)
 

DonH56

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"Regular" transistors? Hmmm...

MOSFETs have their power issues as well. Their driving source is voltage into a (normally) hi-Z node, and static power is ideally zero, but simple CMOS logic shorts the rails every time the gate changes state so the power goes up with frequency and voltage (squared): P = k* C * V^2 * f where k is a constant, C is the effective capacitance, V is the voltage across the gate, and f is the switching frequency. The crossover in power used to be around a few hundred MHz for roughly equivalent BJTs and MOSFETs (do not know if that is still true). In The Olden Days leakage current, the current drawn by a MOSFET when it is not switching, was minor and usually neglected. These days, for the tiny little devices we use, leakage is often half the power of a large chip, and that is power wasted whenever voltage is applied to the device. Leakage scales linearly to exponentially with voltage and temperature (it's complicated) and as devices shrink, even though voltage drops, leakage increases. However, MOSFETs are generally easier to make (fewer processing steps), and can be made very small, so they dominate logic circuits if not analog (at this point most of the analog is probably part of a digital chip). BJTs tend to be bigger overall and require larger isolation regions around them. Sometimes.

Now we are working with FinFETs and looking toward The Next Big Thing.

Personally, I like Ron's duct tape idea... :)
 
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amirm

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Hi Don. As you know, the solution to the mosfet switching loss has been to keep lowering the voltage. But then that scaling got harder and harder. The other has been to put the brakes on clock frequency and hence the reason CPUs have gotten stuck between 2 and 3 Ghz for a decade now. Multiple core CPUs were invented to deal with that but much of what we do on our computers is single threaded and uses only one core. This in turn caused the PC market to stagnate since new CPUs are no longer much faster than the old. That stagnation then led to mobile phones becoming the next computing platform since the gap with the PC was not that large anymore.
 

DonH56

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Yup. Big bang for the buck since it goes by voltage-squared. The (one) problem is that, as voltage drops, it gets harder to turn the devices fully on and off. MOSFETs have rather soft gain characteristics so it takes some voltage to switch them on. Increasing dopants (carriers) allows us to turn them on with ever lowering voltages, keeping gain and speed up, but now with 0 V across them it is hard to get them turned completely off and they leak current (this is one of 6-12 leakage sources depending on what paper you read). Multiply a little leakage current by a billion devices and it adds up. Even at the 28-nm node, several generations behind current SOTA, leakage is about 40 % to 60 % of the power depending upon the operating state. What a pain! Maybe if we could figure out a way to integrate Depends on-chip and stop the leaks... :)
 

Cosmik

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Hi Don. As you know, the solution to the mosfet switching loss has been to keep lowering the voltage. But then that scaling got harder and harder. The other has been to put the brakes on clock frequency and hence the reason CPUs have gotten stuck between 2 and 3 Ghz for a decade now. Multiple core CPUs were invented to deal with that but much of what we do on our computers is single threaded and uses only one core. This in turn caused the PC market to stagnate since new CPUs are no longer much faster than the old. That stagnation then led to mobile phones becoming the next computing platform since the gap with the PC was not that large anymore.
You raise a very interesting point. For a long time, 'Moore's Law' has been fuelling economic growth, which is essential to the concepts of investment, interest and pensions. A few years ago it was fashionable to talk of 'Peak Oil' as being the turning point that would bring economic disaster, but 'Peak CPU' could also be one of those things.
 
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amirm

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You raise a very interesting point. For a long time, 'Moore's Law' has been fuelling economic growth, which is essential to the concepts of investment, interest and pensions. A few years ago it was fashionable to talk of 'Peak Oil' as being the turning point that would bring economic disaster, but 'Peak CPU' could also be one of those things.
Indeed. I remember the day I was in a meeting with Bill Gates who had just gotten a briefing from Intel that they were no longer going to increase CPU clock frequency. Indeed they were going to lower it and then add multiple cores. He was very angry and said we (Microsoft) are going to get screwed. And screwed we were. It was easy for every customer to know/think that a 2 Ghz CPU was faster than a 1.2 Ghz. Not so when the clock speeds got stuck in the mud and cores were added instead.

Worse yet, Intel added insult to injury by inventing all kinds of stupid CPU number. i7 6700K anyone? How about calling every generation of their CPUs the same i5 and i7? Hello? Anyone know anything about marketing there? Every time I go to build a new computer I have to spend a week to come up to speed with their numbering scheme to make sure I am not buying a last generation CPU!

And with it, a thirty run of PC came to an end.
 

Sal1950

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A CPU which is a massive version of that has 1 to 3 billion transistor in a today's CPU in a computer or phone/tablet.
And I thought I was a big deal when I got my 6 transistor Zenith radio that I could carry in my shirt pocket.
 
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