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The CPU is housed on a silicon chip that contains millions of switches and circuits. It has millions of Transistors
4billion
on the order of a billion
Yes it is!
A modern micro processor has atleast 100 million transistors. The Core i7 920 (D0 stepping) has approximately 781 million transistors.
As of the end of 2016, high end multicore microprocessors have from 3,000,000,000 to 8,000,000,000 transistors. But there are plenty of other medium range microprocessors and microcontrollers with much fewer transistors being manufactured.
An 18-core Xeon Haswell-E5 has 5,560,000,000 transistors.
Yes, today's computers use transistors and microprocessors. Smaller transistors subset the amount of RAM that is local to the CPU at any given moment.
A Pentium 4 contains 42 million transistors. Forty-two million transistors isn't very many--the highest-end Itaniums and Xeons have nearly two BILLION transistors.
A CPU can do one thing per processor that the computer contains
Size, power, cost, and speed... The size of a CPU with individual transistors could easily require a room full of electronics, whereas a modern CPU chip is smaller than a small coin. The power of a CPU with individual transistors could easily be in the kilowatt or hundreds of kilowatts range, requiring specialized power systems, whereas a modern CPU chip only requires 25 to 100 watts per core. (At full load.) The cost of a CPU with individual transistors could easily be in the millions of dollars, whereas the modern CPU chip might only be a few hundred dollars. The speed of a CPU with individual transistors is limited by the length of the conductors. The speed of light is about one foot per nanosecond. (3 x 108 m/s divided by 1 x 109 ns/s) If you have a large, room size CPU, there are physical limits on how fast it can go. A modern CPU chip can easily run in the GHz range, an impossible feat for a room sized CPU.
Every electronic devices contains transistors.A telephone consists of transistors.