Chip War: A Sweeping Take on a Critical Technology
Ankur Bhardwaj
CHIP WAR: THE FIGHT FOR THE WORLD’S MOST CRITICAL TECHNOLOGY by Chris Miller Simon & Schuster, UK, , 464 pp., ₹ 1784.00
April 2023, volume 47, No 4

In September 2022, Apple launched the iPhone 14 and its different variants. The phone came armed with different chips, viz., A15 and A16. A15 was the lower spec version as it has 15 billion transistors while A16 carries 16 billion transistors.

In 2019, the then-latest version of the iPhone (p. 11) carried the A13 chip. The A13 chip had over 8.5 billion transistors on  board. So, in barely 3 years, the number of transistors on Apple’s own chip had nearly doubled. In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the founding fathers of the modern microchip universe, said that the number of transistors on microchips would double roughly every two years. This is known as Moore’s Law. It isn’t a law of physics but an observation (and an accurate one) of how the world of semiconductors and microchips has progressed.

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