NVIDIA Blackwell & Hyper-Scale GPUs
The physical engine of artificial intelligence.
Explore this event on the interactive timeline →NVIDIA launched the Blackwell architecture, representing the absolute bleeding edge of semiconductor manufacturing. Designed explicitly to train trillion-parameter AI models, it demonstrated how Moore's Law evolved from single-core CPUs into massive, parallel GPU clusters.
Key Numbers
- Transistors (1971)
- 2,300 (Intel 4004)
- Transistors (2024)
- 208,000,000,000
Verified Facts
- A single Blackwell chip contains 208 billion microscopic transistors. By comparison, the world's first microprocessor (the Intel 4004 in 1971) had just 2,300.
- Because the chips reached the physical limits of how large a piece of silicon can be manufactured (the "reticle limit"), Blackwell actually consists of two massive dies stitched together that communicate at 10 Terabytes per second.
- This exponential explosion in transistor density is the exact physical mechanism driving the Law of Accelerating Returns in computing.