[test77777]

It’s funny, but you’d figure as sophisticated as the manufacturering standards are they could give an exact number. Or couldn’t they?

[dmitrygr]

In theory, the answer is computable, but it probably doesn’t mean what you think it does.

A gigantic chunk of those transistors are just SRAM memory cells for various caches. The number of transistors used to actually implement the logic of the SoC is significantly smaller. I would be surprised if it was more than 5%.

The growth of this number between generations is also likely not very large. Most of the growth is also probably cache sizes.

[kylec]

I'm sure the chip designers at Apple know the exact number, but that doesn't mean Apple's going to share it

[gpm]

I wonder if they even do. I'm sure they could theoretically compute it... but is it something that is ever actually computed?

It seems sort of like asking a programmer how many instructions there are in a binary we maintain. We could find out if we decided it mattered.

[corethree]

I don't think it's as exacting as you think. They build redundant functionality into the chips to meet QA specs. They expect parts of the chip to fail. The point is that it meets the overall specs.