The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device (typically on a single substrate or silicon die). It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity (although the majority of transistors in modern microprocessors are contained in cache memories, which consist mostly of the same memory cell circuits replicated many times). The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a die, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is. A better indication of this is transistor density which is the ratio of a device's transistor count to its die area.
Records As of 2023, the highest transistor count in flash memory is Micron's 2 terabyte (3D-stacked) 16-die, 232-layer V-NAND flash memory chip, with 5.3 trillion floating-gate MOSFETs (3 bits per transistor). The highest transistor count in a single chip processor as of 2020 is that of the deep learning processor Wafer Scale Engine 2 by Cerebras. It has 2.6 trillion MOSFETs in 84 exposed fields (dies) on a wafer, manufactured using TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process. As of 2026, the GPU with the highest transistor count is Nvidia's Rubin accelerator, built on TSMC's custom N3P process node and totaling 336 billion MOSFETs. The highest transistor count in a consumer microprocessor as of March 2025 is 184 billion transistors, in Apple's ARM-based dual-die M3 Ultra SoC, which is fabricated using TSMC's 3 nm semiconductor manufacturing process.
In terms of computer systems that consist of numerous integrated circuits, the supercomputer with the highest transistor count as of 2016 was the Chinese-designed Sunway TaihuLight, which has for all CPUs/nodes combined "about 400 trillion transistors in the processing part of the hardware" and "the DRAM includes about 12 quadrillion transistors, and that's about 97 percent of all the transistors." To compare, the smallest computer, as of 2018 dwarfed by a grain of rice, had on the order of 100,000 transistors. Early experimental solid-state computers had as few as 130 transistors but used large amounts of diode logic. The first carbon nanotube computer had 178 transistors and was a 1-bit one-instruction set computer, while a later one is 16-bit (its instruction set is 32-bit RISC-V though). Ionic transistor chips ("water-based" analog limited processor), have up to hundreds of such transistors. Estimates of the total numbers of transistors manufactured:
Up to 2014: 2.9×1021 Up to 2018: 1.3×1022
Transistor count
Microprocessors
A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit. It is a multi-purpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and provides results as output. The development of MOS integrated circuit technology in the 1960s led to the development of the first microprocessors. The 20-bit MP944, developed by Garrett AiResearch for the U.S. Navy's F-14 Tomcat fighter in 1970, is considered by its designer Ray Holt to be the first microprocessor. It was a multi-chip microprocessor, fabricated on six MOS chips. However, it was classified by the Navy until 1998. The 4-bit Intel 4004, released in 1971, was the first single-chip microprocessor. Modern microprocessors typically include on-chip cache memories. The number of transistors used for these cache memories typically far exceeds the number of transistors used to implement the logic of the microprocessor (that is, excluding the cache). For example, the last DEC Alpha chip uses 90% of its transistors for cache.
GPUs A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display. The designer refers to the technology company that designs the logic of the integrated circuit chip (such as Nvidia and AMD). The manufacturer ("Fab.") refers to the semiconductor company that fabricates the chip using its semiconductor manufacturing process at a foundry (such as TSMC and Samsung Semiconductor). The transistor count in a chip is dependent on a manufacturer's fabrication process, with smaller semiconductor nodes typically enabling higher transistor density and thus higher transistor counts. The random-access memory (RAM) that comes with GPUs (such as VRAM, SGRAM or HBM) greatly increases the total transistor count, with the memory typically accounting for the majority of transistors in a graphics card. For example, Nvidia's Tesla P100 has 15 billion FinFETs (16 nm) in the GPU in addition to 16 GB of HBM2 memory, totaling about 150 billion MOSFETs on the graphics card. The following table does not include the memory. For memory transistor counts, see the Memory section below.
FPGA A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing.
Memory
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