I shrunk down into an M5 chip

MKBHD visualizes transistor scale from 1946 vacuum tubes to Apple M5’s 3nm nodes using 100x shrink steps in Blender.

• If iPhones were built with 1946 vacuum-tube transistors, the device would need to be the size of New Jersey to fit 19 billion transistors.
• A modern transistor scaled to the size of a Toyota Prius would make an iPhone the size of planet Earth.
• Apple M5 uses 3nm transistors; individual atoms are visible at that scale and resemble marbles.
• Moore’s Law has held since the semiconductor industry’s start: transistor count doubles roughly every 2 years, halving size 10 times between 1948 and 1968.
• By the 1980s, humans were consistently manufacturing functional electronics at the 2-micrometer scale — smaller than what the human eye can resolve.
• The full M5 chip is 32,000 times larger than the tiny cutout section visualized in the video.
• At 20nm scale, air molecules are too large to breathe and visible light wavelengths equal a person’s height — physics behaves strangely.
• No generative AI was used; visualization was built entirely in Blender.

2025-12-26 · Watch on YouTube