How many transistors are in an Apple M4 chip?

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Cifra · Accepted Answer

28,000,000,000 transistors. The M4 packs about 28 billion transistors onto a chip roughly the size of a postage stamp, built on a 3-nanometre process. For scale, the original 1971 Intel 4004 had 2,300. Doubling roughly every two years for fifty years is what turns a thousand into tens of billions. Derive it from Moore's law. The explanation gives the starting point: about two thousand three hundred transistors in 1971. Doubling every two years for fifty years is twenty-five doublings, which is a factor of around thirty million — and two thousand times thirty million lands in the tens of billions. That derivation is the most useful thing on this page, because it means you never need to memorise a chip specification. Pick any historical chip you know and the year, apply the doubling rule, and you get the modern figure. The rule has held for five decades, which is remarkable for an empirical observation with no physical law behind it. The physical comparison is what makes it absurd: tens of billions of components on a chip the size of a postage stamp, built on a process measured in nanometres. This site's companion question notes that the process node name no longer corresponds to a physical dimension, but the density it produces is real and is approaching limits set by the size of atoms.

Source	Apple newsroom
Figure refers to	2024
Last checked	September 1, 2026
Unit	transistors

How many transistors are in an Apple M4 chip?

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