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I shrunk down into an M5 chip — Marques Brownlee shadowing | TryShadowing
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Marques Brownlee
I shrunk down into an M5 chip
I shrunk down into an M5 chip
Marques Brownlee
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11:51 · Dec 26, 2025
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Isn't
it
crazy
how
we
taught
rocks
to
do
math?
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0:00
Isn't it crazy how we taught rocks to do math?
0:03
Anyway, every year now, for a few years in a row,
0:05
Apple unveils the latest version of their computer chips.
0:08
M1, M2, M3, M4, and now the latest version, M5.
0:13
And every year, there's some slide
0:15
or some graphic with an impossibly big number of transistors on one chip on
0:20
a device that you can hold in your hands.
0:22
Like, it's really hard to understand what that even means.
0:25
Now, I'm a numbers person,
0:26
so I really enjoy like those scale of the universe type videos.
0:30
And like, how else is the average person supposed to appreciate how small we
0:34
are and wrap your head around the billions of stars in the galaxy
0:37
and then the billions of galaxies in the universe?
0:40
It's crazy.
0:42
But what about billions of transistors in a single device
0:48
that you can fit in your pocket
0:50
and watch this video on?
0:51
What if you could actually appreciate just how densely packed everything has to be
0:56
and how small it has to get to fit on a device
0:59
that just goes in your pocket?
1:01
Well, that would require changing the scale in the opposite direction.
1:05
We would have to shrink way down.
1:09
But with a little help, I'm up for that challenge.
1:12
By the way, no generative AI is being used to create this video.
1:17
Just a whole lot of Blender.
1:20
So, let's get to it.
1:22
Every time I snap my fingers,
1:25
I'm going to shrink down by a hundred times, which is a massive amount.
1:30
Two orders of magnitude.
1:31
So, here I am, you know, the person, you know, I'm 6' 3,
1:34
so around 2 m tall, basically.
1:36
So, you can picture me standing in the room in front of you,
1:38
and the gadgets we use
1:40
and know every day fit into the palm of our hands.
1:42
But what about 100 times smaller?
1:48
All right, here we are.
1:50
Now I'm the size of a a single key on your keyboard.
1:54
And of course, it wouldn't be a good scale video without a banana for
1:56
scale.
1:57
So, got that, too.
1:58
But at this size, okay,
1:59
like I can walk around on the keyboard deck of this MacBook Pro,
2:03
which is now the size of an apartment building,
2:06
and I can already start to see
2:08
and appreciate how complex all these components already are.
2:12
And RAM and storage have been ridiculously small for years now.
2:17
And so we've got eight terabytes of it.
2:20
Uh, and the M5 chip should be right over here powering the whole thing.
2:26
Now, this is the size of a single transistor in 1948.
2:33
This is pretty insane.
2:34
Like, we've clearly made a lot of progress in the last 75 years.
2:38
You don't need me to tell you that.
2:39
But this already puts it into perspective like how far we've come since a
2:44
computer was the size of a room.
2:46
And one more thing I want to at least highlight here.
2:49
Technology only gets better because of the people working really hard on it.
2:53
Like without this hard work, none of this improvement happens.
2:57
But because we do have all these brilliant minds focused on computers,
3:00
we have things like Moore's law, which I'm sure you've heard of.
3:04
It says that the number of transistors on a microchip roughly doubles every 2
3:10
years.
3:11
And that's stayed about true since the beginning of the semiconductor industry,
3:16
which means we have a long way to go.
3:21
Okay.
3:22
Wow.
3:23
Welcome to the scale of micrometers.
3:26
I am now 200 microme tall,
3:29
which makes me about twice as tall as this human hair is thick.
3:34
This is already the size of some of the tiniest stuff we're able to
3:37
see using our own eyes.
3:38
But yeah, a typical sheet of paper is about 100 micrometers thick.
3:42
Looks pretty tall to me.
3:44
A glass screen protector, too, thicker than a lot of people realize.
3:48
But what's crazy is
3:50
that first transistor I told you about is now the height of the tallest
3:54
building in the world compared to me.
3:57
So, here next to me now is a transistor from 1968, 20 years later.
4:05
Moore's law says that that's enough time for the number of transistors per chip
4:08
to double 10 times,
4:10
which means they've cut the size of a transistor in half, 10 times.
4:14
Now, computers in 1968 were still primarily used by governments
4:18
and research labs and were still the size of rooms
4:21
and cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
4:24
This is still pre- internet,
4:26
but they've already come this far since the earliest days of semiconductors.
4:32
It's wild.
4:35
All right, another 100x shrink.
4:39
So now it's getting ridiculous.
4:42
I am now 2 micrometers tall.
4:46
At this point, I'm actually literally invisible to the human eye,
4:49
which kind of feels like a superpower.
4:51
But I'll also need to be very careful
4:53
because a human hair is like a cliff the size of a 25story building.
4:59
A single grain of rice at this scale would be the size of Mount
5:06
Reineer.
5:06
I could live comfortably inside a single groove of a vinyl record
5:10
and a 1 millm droplet of water would feel like a massive lake.
5:14
This this is the scale that bacteria live at.
5:18
It's funny because physics also starts to behave kind of strangely at this scale.
5:24
Air molecules, for example, are too large for these tiny lungs to breathe.
5:28
And even the wavelength of visible light is as tall as I am.
5:33
So my tiny eyes wouldn't exactly pick it all up.
5:37
And the world would look kind of blurry and wavy.
5:39
But somehow by the 1980s,
5:43
humans have found a way to consistently manufacture functional electronics at this size.
5:50
Just like clockwork, Moore's law continues to see dramatic
5:53
and consistent improvements of the semiconductors in our computers.
5:58
So by 2003, the computers that we had, you know,
6:03
they started to resemble the ones we have today.
6:05
Laptops are starting to go mainstream.
6:07
Uh Wi-Fi is a standard.
6:09
Windows XP is the most widely used desktop operating system.
6:14
Good times.
6:15
But if you can believe it, we have to shrink down 100x yet again.
6:24
Okay, 20 nanm.
6:28
I am now 20 nanome tall.
6:32
So an individual transistor from a brand new 2026 M5 MacBook Pro is about
6:39
the size of a garage for me.
6:41
Now, I'll note that this most likely isn't 100% accurate
6:44
because Apple's not going to share their exact chip architecture with me making a
6:48
YouTube video.
6:49
But still, the smallest parts of it are still smaller than me.
6:53
And at this scale, you can see individual atoms,
6:57
which are the size of marbles.
7:00
Now, obviously, or maybe not obviously,
7:02
but 3nm transistors this size aren't just built like other objects the way you
7:07
might be expecting.
7:08
There's a pretty refined manufacturing process called photoiththography.
7:12
Basically, it's like developing a photo with light projected through a microscope
7:17
but onto atoms instead of film.
7:20
And that is how you end up with billions of these inside a computer
7:24
that you can sit on your lap.
7:27
Now, to be honest,
7:28
I don't really know how much longer Moore's law can apply to semiconductors
7:33
as they get down to the literal atomic level,
7:36
but I sure do want to appreciate it while it's happening.
7:40
Speaking of appreciating it, hey, this is Epic Spaceman,
7:43
one of my favorite creators and of course a massive help with this video.
7:47
He's been down to this scale before in another video
7:50
and it's a pretty crazy view,
7:52
right?
7:52
>> Hi, Marcus.
7:54
Yeah, it really is.
7:55
Even when you can stand on them,
7:56
I still struggle to get my head around how many transistors there are here,
8:01
considering this is just a tiny cutout section.
8:06
The full chip is 32,000 times bigger than this.
8:12
So yeah, the best way for my brain to really appreciate all of this
8:16
has been to visualize this scale from the tiniest 3 nanometer transistors we have
8:23
in computers today at the scale of DNA
8:26
and individual atoms all the way to the micrometer scale with the computers of
8:31
the 2000s and '9s
8:33
and 80s.
8:34
Humanity has been so motivated for
8:37
so many years to get this stuff down to such a ridiculously small scale
8:42
that it makes a grain of rice look like a massive object.
8:47
And yet it keeps going
8:49
and going all the way back to the earliest transistors the size of a
8:54
deck of cards.
8:56
You know, something else I've realized though,
8:59
even though we've seen now all the scale and how tiny things can get,
9:03
sometimes it can still be hard to keep all the nanometers
9:06
and pometers sorted and
9:07
and really comprehend it all.
9:10
And sometimes it's actually easier to make things bigger rather than smaller.
9:15
So, let's try this.
9:17
The world's first electronic computer is often credited as the Eniac.
9:23
They finished it in 1946
9:25
and they had light bulb sized vacuum tubes called triodes.
9:29
And of course, that computer was the size of a whole room.
9:33
But if we still made computers like this with transistors that big,
9:39
how big do you think the iPhone would need to be to fit the
9:44
19 billion transistors that it has today?
9:49
Think about it.
9:49
Maybe the size of a city block.
9:53
Or what about the size of the entirety of Central Park?
9:57
Keep in mind, you need to fit all these billions of transistors.
10:01
Wouldn't it be crazy
10:01
if we carry around the equivalent technology of a phone the size of the
10:06
city of Manhattan?
10:08
Well, the reality is these are all still too small.
10:12
Your phone with the technology from 80 years ago would need to be the
10:17
size of the state of New Jersey to fit them all.
10:21
This progression of technology has given us a computer the size of a US
10:26
state 270 mi long
10:28
and shrunk it down to fit in our pockets.
10:33
I'll even do you one better.
10:34
Okay.
10:34
If a modern transistor was roughly the size of a Toyota Prius,
10:40
then that iPhone that fits them all would be about the size of planet
10:46
Earth.
10:48
So hopefully that gives you an idea of just how ridiculously small individual transistors
10:53
have gotten since the beginning of computers.
10:58
These numbers are crazy
10:59
and sometimes hard to appreciate
11:01
when you just see them flashed for two seconds on a keynote slide.
11:05
So hopefully this gives you a better idea.
11:07
The crazy part is that in the scale of the cosmos,
11:11
it's still almost nothing.
11:13
Like our Milky Way alone, you might know,
11:15
has over a 100 billion stars
11:18
and then there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in our observable universe.
11:24
So it's all pretty crazy.
11:25
But if you'd be interested in more videos going deep on this exact type
11:28
of incredible scale,
11:29
definitely check out the Epic Spaceman channel.
11:32
His recent videos were 100% of the inspiration to make this video.
11:36
And actually, his latest video dives more into how these transistors actually work,
11:40
which at this scale is pretty incredible on its own.
11:42
Go subscribe over there.
11:44
You'd be missing out if you didn't.
11:46
Thanks for watching.
11:48
See you in the next one.
11:50
Peace.
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