Can innovation make personal computing more customized than it is today?

If millennials can take personal computing for granted today, it is because of 50 years of innovation that has gone into power-packing the central processing unit (CPU) chip. The power in each sleek machine today would have taken up an entire room of equipment a few decades ago. The invention of the transistor changed everything. While vacuum tubes would be several inches long, transistors were much, much smaller —they were just millimeters in size when they were initially built, enabling compact designs for the first time.

The world’s first microprocessor, introduced in 1971, had 2,300 transistors, performing 60,000 operations per second and addressing 640 bytes of memory. With years of improvement, transistors have been shrunk to the nanometer scale, performing billions more calculations per second and offering incredible levels of performance, memory, durability, reliability and power savings.