Stone to Silicon

Computing · 2005

Multi-core processors

When clock speeds stalled, chips gained more cores.

With Dennard scaling ending, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 and Intel's Pentium D put two cores on one chip. Parallelism became the main source of performance growth.

See it in the living treeWikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 1

What it led to 2

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Transistors per microprocessor Latest: 58.2B transistors (2021) Source: Our World in Data

Fastest supercomputer Latest: 1.81B GFLOP/s (2025) Source: Our World in Data