DRESS UP YOUR NUMBERS 109
transistors on a single piece of silicon. Engineers described the
technology as “breathtaking.” But that’s because they’re engi-
neers. How could the average consumer and investors appreciate
the profound achievement? Intel’s testing chief, John Barton,
found the answer.
In an interview with the New York Times, Barton said an Intel
processor created twenty-seven years ago had 29,000 transistors;
the i7 boasted 730 million transistors on a chip the same size.
He equated the two by comparing the city of Ithaca, New York
(population 29,000), with the continent of Europe (population
730 million). “Ithaca is quite complex in its own right, if you
think about all that goes on. If we scale up the population to
730 million, we come to Europe at about the right size. Now
take Europe and shrink it until it all fits in the same land mass
as Ithaca.”^5
Number Smiths
Every industry has numbers, and nearly every presenter in every
industry fails to make numbers interesting and meaningful. For
the rest of this scene, let’s examine several examples of individ-
uals and companies who have accomplished what Jobs does in
every presentation—make numbers meaningful.
DEFINING ONE THOUSAND TRILLION
On June 9, 2008, IBM issued a press release touting a superfast
supercomputer. As its name suggests, Roadrunner is one really
quick system. It operates at one petaflop per second. What’s a
petaflop? Glad you asked. It’s one thousand trillion calculations
per second. IBM realized that the number would be meaning-
less to the vast majority of readers, so it added the following
description:
How fast is a petaflop? Lots of laptops. That’s roughly equiva-
lent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today’s
fastest laptop computers. You would need a stack of laptops
1.5 miles high to equal Roadrunner’s performance.