Marques Brownlee Takes a Journey Inside the Apple M5 Chip

Marques Brownlee, or MKBHD, takes us on a mind-bending visual voyage into the world of diminishing scales in his most recent video. Using some very clever animations, he takes us through a step-by-step reduction in his size, demonstrating how incredibly small modern computer parts have become. Every snap of his fingers transports him down another dimension, making everyday objects appear like enormous vistas.

Brownlee begins at normal human height, then abruptly stands on a single key on a MacBook keyboard. The entire keyboard spreads out before him like a city block, which is quite weird. A nearby banana provides a welcome reference point, emphasizing how quickly our view is shifting. As he shrinks, the top of a sheet of paper looks down on him; it is a whopping 100 micrometres thick, or approximately twice the width of a human hair.

Next, historical transistors are shown, with the first one from 1947 appearing to be as tall as a skyscraper at this point. Brownlee observes that sizes were halving roughly every two years, following the pattern of Moore’s Law, which had largely steered the industry for decades. By the late 1960s, transistors were becoming increasingly small.

As we progress farther into the voyage, the human eye’s ability to see detail diminishes. A single human hair resembles a gigantic cliff that extends for many of stories. Rice grains form gigantic mountains. Water droplets form huge lakes. Bacteria are everywhere, and air molecules are bouncing about on screen. Light waves begin to obscure eyesight because their wavelength is roughly equal to the viewer’s size.

Brownlee then reaches 20 nanometers, where individual atoms begin to resemble marbles dispersed about. In this image, a transistor from the M5 chip in a 2025 MacBook Pro appears like a gigantic structure reaching out before him. Manufacturers are creating these parts by etching small patterns onto silicon wafers, projecting light onto them, and arranging the atoms layer by layer.

Brownlee worked with animator Epic Spaceman to extend the visuals down to three nanometer features and even atomic levels for this showcase, making it a true joint effort. The complete M5 chip is mind-boggling; it’s 32,000 times larger than the little part on screen. To put this into perspective, early computers used vacuum tubes the size of light bulbs and took up entire rooms, in sharp contrast to today’s pocket gadgets, which contain billions of transistors.

Scaling back up emphasizes how significant the achievement is. If we built modern smartphone transistors using 1940s technology, they would cover an area the size of Central Park or a small state. Brownlee is very contemplative on this progress, from gigantic room-filling machines to pocket powerhouses, but he also recognizes that we are approaching limits as parts become smaller and smaller.

Viewers get a good idea of how dense the transistor layouts are in the M5. Apple can fit approximately 28 billion inside the chip utilizing a brand new 3 nanometer technology. This allows engineers to design super-dense arrangements that accommodate large storage capacities, such as 8 terabytes of memory in future devices.