The first carbon nanotube computer has 178 transistors and is a 1-bit one-instruction set computer, while a later one is 16-bit (while the instruction set is 32-bit RISC-V). Early experimental solid state computers had as few as 130 transistors, but used large amounts of diode logic. In terms of computer systems that consist of numerous integrated circuits, the supercomputer with the highest transistor count as of 2016 is the Chinese-designed Sunway TaihuLight, which has for all CPUs/nodes combined 'about 400 trillion transistors in the processing part of the hardware' and 'the DRAM includes about 12 quadrillion transistors, and that's about 97 percent of all the transistors.' To compare, the smallest computer, as of 2018 dwarfed by a grain of rice, has on the order of 100,000 transistors. As of 2020, the highest transistor count in any IC chip is a deep learning engine called the Wafer Scale Engine 2 by Cerebras, using a special design to route around any non-functional core on the device it has 2.6 trillion MOSFETs, manufactured using TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process. As of 2019, the highest transistor count in any IC chip was Samsung's 1 terabyte eUFS ( 3D-stacked) V-NAND flash memory chip, with 2 trillion floating-gate MOSFETs ( 4 bits per transistor).

As of 2022, the highest transistor count GPU is Nvidia's H100, built on TSMC's N4 process and totalling 80 billion MOSFETs. Īs of 2022, the largest transistor count in a commercially available microprocessor is 114 billion transistors, in Apple's ARM-based dual-die M1 Ultra system on a chip, which is fabricated using TSMC's 5 nm semiconductor manufacturing process.

The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observed that the transistor count doubles approximately every two years. It is the most common measure of IC complexity (although the majority of transistors in modern microprocessors are contained in the cache memories, which consist mostly of the same memory cell circuits replicated many times). The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device.

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