I shrunk down into an M5 chip

Isn't it crazy how we taught rocks to do math?

Anyway, every year now, for a few years in a row,

Apple unveils the latest version of their computer chips.

M1, M2, M3, M4, and now the latest version, M5.

And every year, there's some slide

or some graphic with an impossibly big number of transistors on one chip on

a device that you can hold in your hands.

Like, it's really hard to understand what that even means.

Now, I'm a numbers person,

so I really enjoy like those scale of the universe type videos.

And like, how else is the average person supposed to appreciate how small we

are and wrap your head around the billions of stars in the galaxy

and then the billions of galaxies in the universe?

It's crazy.

But what about billions of transistors in a single device

that you can fit in your pocket

and watch this video on?

What if you could actually appreciate just how densely packed everything has to be

and how small it has to get to fit on a device

that just goes in your pocket?

Well, that would require changing the scale in the opposite direction.

We would have to shrink way down.

But with a little help, I'm up for that challenge.

By the way, no generative AI is being used to create this video.

Just a whole lot of Blender.

So, let's get to it.

Every time I snap my fingers,

I'm going to shrink down by a hundred times, which is a massive amount.

Two orders of magnitude.

So, here I am, you know, the person, you know, I'm 6' 3,

so around 2 m tall, basically.

So, you can picture me standing in the room in front of you,

and the gadgets we use

and know every day fit into the palm of our hands.

But what about 100 times smaller?

All right, here we are.

Now I'm the size of a a single key on your keyboard.

And of course, it wouldn't be a good scale video without a banana for

scale.

So, got that, too.

But at this size, okay,

like I can walk around on the keyboard deck of this MacBook Pro,

which is now the size of an apartment building,

and I can already start to see

and appreciate how complex all these components already are.

And RAM and storage have been ridiculously small for years now.

And so we've got eight terabytes of it.

Uh, and the M5 chip should be right over here powering the whole thing.

Now, this is the size of a single transistor in 1948.

This is pretty insane.

Like, we've clearly made a lot of progress in the last 75 years.

You don't need me to tell you that.

But this already puts it into perspective like how far we've come since a

computer was the size of a room.

And one more thing I want to at least highlight here.

Technology only gets better because of the people working really hard on it.

Like without this hard work, none of this improvement happens.

But because we do have all these brilliant minds focused on computers,

we have things like Moore's law, which I'm sure you've heard of.

It says that the number of transistors on a microchip roughly doubles every 2

years.

And that's stayed about true since the beginning of the semiconductor industry,

which means we have a long way to go.

Okay.

Wow.

Welcome to the scale of micrometers.

I am now 200 microme tall,

which makes me about twice as tall as this human hair is thick.

This is already the size of some of the tiniest stuff we're able to

see using our own eyes.

But yeah, a typical sheet of paper is about 100 micrometers thick.

Looks pretty tall to me.

A glass screen protector, too, thicker than a lot of people realize.

But what's crazy is

that first transistor I told you about is now the height of the tallest

building in the world compared to me.

So, here next to me now is a transistor from 1968, 20 years later.

Moore's law says that that's enough time for the number of transistors per chip

to double 10 times,

which means they've cut the size of a transistor in half, 10 times.

Now, computers in 1968 were still primarily used by governments

and research labs and were still the size of rooms

and cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

This is still pre- internet,

but they've already come this far since the earliest days of semiconductors.

It's wild.

All right, another 100x shrink.

So now it's getting ridiculous.

I am now 2 micrometers tall.

At this point, I'm actually literally invisible to the human eye,

which kind of feels like a superpower.

But I'll also need to be very careful

because a human hair is like a cliff the size of a 25story building.

A single grain of rice at this scale would be the size of Mount

Reineer.

I could live comfortably inside a single groove of a vinyl record

and a 1 millm droplet of water would feel like a massive lake.

This this is the scale that bacteria live at.

It's funny because physics also starts to behave kind of strangely at this scale.

Air molecules, for example, are too large for these tiny lungs to breathe.

And even the wavelength of visible light is as tall as I am.

So my tiny eyes wouldn't exactly pick it all up.

And the world would look kind of blurry and wavy.

But somehow by the 1980s,

humans have found a way to consistently manufacture functional electronics at this size.

Just like clockwork, Moore's law continues to see dramatic

and consistent improvements of the semiconductors in our computers.

So by 2003, the computers that we had, you know,

they started to resemble the ones we have today.

Laptops are starting to go mainstream.

Uh Wi-Fi is a standard.

Windows XP is the most widely used desktop operating system.

Good times.

But if you can believe it, we have to shrink down 100x yet again.

Okay, 20 nanm.

I am now 20 nanome tall.

So an individual transistor from a brand new 2026 M5 MacBook Pro is about

the size of a garage for me.

Now, I'll note that this most likely isn't 100% accurate

because Apple's not going to share their exact chip architecture with me making a

YouTube video.

But still, the smallest parts of it are still smaller than me.

And at this scale, you can see individual atoms,

which are the size of marbles.

Now, obviously, or maybe not obviously,

but 3nm transistors this size aren't just built like other objects the way you

might be expecting.

There's a pretty refined manufacturing process called photoiththography.

Basically, it's like developing a photo with light projected through a microscope

but onto atoms instead of film.

And that is how you end up with billions of these inside a computer

that you can sit on your lap.

Now, to be honest,

I don't really know how much longer Moore's law can apply to semiconductors

as they get down to the literal atomic level,

but I sure do want to appreciate it while it's happening.

Speaking of appreciating it, hey, this is Epic Spaceman,

one of my favorite creators and of course a massive help with this video.

He's been down to this scale before in another video

and it's a pretty crazy view,

right?

>> Hi, Marcus.

Yeah, it really is.

Even when you can stand on them,

I still struggle to get my head around how many transistors there are here,

considering this is just a tiny cutout section.

The full chip is 32,000 times bigger than this.

So yeah, the best way for my brain to really appreciate all of this

has been to visualize this scale from the tiniest 3 nanometer transistors we have

in computers today at the scale of DNA

and individual atoms all the way to the micrometer scale with the computers of

the 2000s and '9s

and 80s.

Humanity has been so motivated for

so many years to get this stuff down to such a ridiculously small scale

that it makes a grain of rice look like a massive object.

And yet it keeps going

and going all the way back to the earliest transistors the size of a

deck of cards.

You know, something else I've realized though,

even though we've seen now all the scale and how tiny things can get,

sometimes it can still be hard to keep all the nanometers

and pometers sorted and

and really comprehend it all.

And sometimes it's actually easier to make things bigger rather than smaller.

So, let's try this.

The world's first electronic computer is often credited as the Eniac.

They finished it in 1946

and they had light bulb sized vacuum tubes called triodes.

And of course, that computer was the size of a whole room.

But if we still made computers like this with transistors that big,

how big do you think the iPhone would need to be to fit the

19 billion transistors that it has today?

Think about it.

Maybe the size of a city block.

Or what about the size of the entirety of Central Park?

Keep in mind, you need to fit all these billions of transistors.

Wouldn't it be crazy

if we carry around the equivalent technology of a phone the size of the

city of Manhattan?

Well, the reality is these are all still too small.

Your phone with the technology from 80 years ago would need to be the

size of the state of New Jersey to fit them all.

This progression of technology has given us a computer the size of a US

state 270 mi long

and shrunk it down to fit in our pockets.

I'll even do you one better.

Okay.

If a modern transistor was roughly the size of a Toyota Prius,

then that iPhone that fits them all would be about the size of planet

Earth.

So hopefully that gives you an idea of just how ridiculously small individual transistors

have gotten since the beginning of computers.

These numbers are crazy

and sometimes hard to appreciate

when you just see them flashed for two seconds on a keynote slide.

So hopefully this gives you a better idea.

The crazy part is that in the scale of the cosmos,

it's still almost nothing.

Like our Milky Way alone, you might know,

has over a 100 billion stars

and then there's hundreds of billions of galaxies in our observable universe.

So it's all pretty crazy.

But if you'd be interested in more videos going deep on this exact type

of incredible scale,

definitely check out the Epic Spaceman channel.

His recent videos were 100% of the inspiration to make this video.

And actually, his latest video dives more into how these transistors actually work,

which at this scale is pretty incredible on its own.

Go subscribe over there.

You'd be missing out if you didn't.

Thanks for watching.

See you in the next one.

Peace.