One chip holds more switches than the Earth holds people

Published counts for the densest processors of the early 2020s run past a hundred billion transistors. About eight billion people are alive.

Apple’s M2 Ultra, in 2023, was given as 134 billion transistors. NVIDIA’s Blackwell B200, announced the next year, was given as 208 billion. Either number clears the population of the planet with an order of magnitude to spare, and a phone processor from the same years, around twenty billion, already clears it. The switches are not little machines you could see. They are regions of doped silicon, a few nanometres on a side, that conduct or refuse to depending on a voltage on a neighbour.

The count is a manufacturer’s total, and makers do not all draw the boundary in the same place. It is still the right order. Nothing else people manufacture is replicated so many times in one object, and the object still fits in a hand. The hand, for comparison, contains nothing like that many cells of any one kind that switches.