the.com/chip
a sliver of potato or silicon, both somehow ruling the modern world
means A small piece broken or cut off something larger — or, by extension, a thin slice of food (potato chips, fish and chips) or a tiny wafer of semiconductor circuitry.
from From Old English 'cipp,' meaning a small piece cut from wood, and its verb cousin 'cippian,' to cut. The word stayed humble and woody for centuries — a chip was simply a fragment chiselled free. Its career exploded only later: fried potatoes claimed it, then poker tables (the gambling 'chip,' likely from the same notion of a small counter-shaped piece), and finally, in the mid-20th century, electronics borrowed it for the flake of silicon that now runs the world. One little Anglo-Saxon woodcutting term, somehow promoted to global ruler.
- silicon brains
- A single chip can hold billions of transistors
- crisp origin
- Invented in 1853 by an annoyed chef
- gambling token
- Casino chips are tracked with hidden RFID tags
- chip on shoulder
- Phrase came from literal wood-chip dueling challenges
- blue chip
- Term borrowed from poker's highest-value chip
intel 4004 — first commercial microprocessor, 1971, 10 micrometers
apple m1 — 8-core processor in macbook air, 2020, 5 nanometers
nvidia h100 — ai accelerator gpu, 80 billion transistors, 2022