A larger transistor budget allows the addition of specialized instructions, which increase the microprocessor s speed in processing specialized information such as graphics by increasing the amount of information processed per instruction. Billions of instructions per second. The size of the transistors determines how many will fit on a chip of a given size. The smaller the transistors, the more will fit on the chip, determining the chip s transistor budget. The size of the transistors also determines the transistor s switching speed.
Smaller transistors switch faster.
One micron is one one-millionth of a meter or about 40 millionths of one inch. Finally, the power required to switch smaller transistors is less, so smaller pixels in the design rules allow the batteries in laptop computers to last longer. 16 bits can address 65,536 bytes of memory. As memory prices drop, it becomes necessary to address over 4 billion bytes of memory. The 80786 family is due out from Intel in the year 2000.