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Around this time last year we ran a story with some fun facts about Intel's then debutant 32nm manufacturing technology. For example, we learned that a 32nm transistor can switch on and off over 300 billion times in one second, conversely it would take a human 4000 years to flick a light switch on and off that many times. On a similar fashion, Intel compared the pace of innovation in space travel. Had it increased at the pace of Moore’s Law since 1971, you would now be able to travel at the speed of light, 671 million miles per hour.

For the launch of their 2nd-gen Core CPUs (a.k.a. Sandy Bridge), Intel have compiled another interesting list of fun facts in a whitepaper. We have selected the ones we find more amusing and are republishing them here with Intel's permission:

• There are close to 1 billion transistors inside a 2nd Generation Intel Core processor. If a car were to have 1 billion parts - compared to the 30.000 they currently have - it would take the most productive car manufacturer 114 years to assemble this car.
• If a processor were a country and its transistor count was a country’s population, a 2nd Generation Intel Core processor would be the third most populated country in the world (995 million+) just behind China and India.
• A 2nd Generation Intel Core processor contains 540 million more transistors than the number of registered cars in the European Union, the United States and the Asia Pacific region combined.
• If you equate the power consumption of a laptop based on the 2nd Generation Intel Core processors to an electric clothes dryer, drying one load for 60 minutes is equivalent to running a laptop for 147 hours or 6 days and 2.4 hours. If you compare the processor to an electric oven. baking a pizza for 45 minutes at 350 degrees (Fahrenheit) is equivalent to running 67 laptops for 50 hours.

TechSpot has the article HERE!