If you used discrete components how big would it be?

If you were limited to only using transistors and other standard discrete components how big would a typical home computer be?

The Pentium 4 alone has 50+ Million transistors, not to mention support chips. Would you like some memory with that? You do the math... Of course the size would depend on what package your discretes are in and what kind of board and loading you used. Performance could be a bit sluggish too... :->

Dave :)

Depends. Faced with the necessity to provide a special room solely for the home computer, most people were sit down and do some serious thinking about what facilities they really needed and could afford.

My 2c is that 90% of modern computer capacity is wasted and never used.

Shit, where I work probly only about a quarter of what we have flies along, the rest labours intensely under the kind of loads we put on it, and my home PC is just the same, doesn't matter how many times I upgrade, the resources run dry within 6 months and things start to slowww down. The problem is it's much easier to write software that utilises additional processing power/memory/storage space/graphics capability/etc.etc. than it is to design hardware to cater for it.

I have 1/2 gigabyte of ram.

thats 4 gigabit. 4000 million bits.

Each bit requires one transistor and one capacitor, and then theres overhead.

The rest of the system hardly adds many transistors to that.

but 4 billion transistors is going to take a lot of discrete components !

What the ?? they dont use fully discrete circuits. They use chip ram at least.

But just think of how many jobs board level repairs would create!

David

Fred Ferd wrote:

You would never get that many boards working at one time, and the buss speed would be in the KHz range due tho the size of the system.

Don't confuse grunt (speed, ram, etc) with facilities (SIO, PIP, USB, Fire, Midi, etc)

Besides, you might work in Game development or GIS or Video editing, which I agree are very demanding.

Huge. I actually used a couple of minis and mainframes from the discrete transistor era and the DEC PDP9 was a whole series of wardrobe sized metal cabinets that you could actually stand in when you swung out the back door which had the entire computer proper on postcard sized plug in cards which plugged in in a huge array that filled the entire back door with the cards all effectively stacked up vertically. Each postcard sized card had about 10 transistors on it with most of the cards. And that was only 8K, nothing like the memory of a modern PC.

The mainframes were physically even bigger, and werent anything like the horsepower of a PC or anything like the memory either.

I thoughtmy PDP-11 was big. Apparently the first Cray-1(1976ish i think) did about 80 megaflops/per second. Apparently an athlon 2800 does around 670megaflops

Plenty of the 360s didnt.

And plenty of the older stuff like the 7090 did anyway.

The discrete transistor computers mostly didnt do it that way, they used core instead.

Ferrite toroid core memory was possibly used in that era. These could be made into quite small sizes (though massive compared to silicon RAM). These arrays would be driven by power transistors - though being arranged in a matrix grid, this would drastically cut the number or driver transistors that would have been needed.

Still have a board of it here somewhere that I never bothered to chuck out.

yes but its the unused features of the software that cause bloat.

and these computers may be stalled by the lack of ram, or by slow hard drives

I dont know how to derive the 90%. That may well be wildly inaccruate. maybe its 60% or 99%.

Fascinating sites thank you

OK for example transistors in the tiny black plastic they usually come in..... I can well imagine how big it would be LOL.....

I was asking out of curiosity

Is that like a board of tiny donut rings?

I've seen one very briefly at a TAFE way back in the 80s when I did a computing course.

They were teaching courses in BASIC because at the time it seemed popular. Around 1982 /83

They werent normally done on a board.