Fact-Checking the Birth Rate of Mobile Phones

As a user of micro-blogging site twitter (follow me at @netrinomike), I recently came across this brief note from @intel_jim:

Paul Steinberg, Motorola Chief Architect, "World has 2 births/second but buys 32 mobile phones/second". xTCA webcast

Wow, I thought, I need to blog about the even more impressive birth rate for CPUs in general!

But something is wrong either with Mr. Steinberg's calculation or the quote. So let's look at the facts, using 2008 data.

According to an estimate on Wikipedia, the number of human births per year was about 154 million in 2008. Given that there a little over 468 million seconds in a year, that's about 1 human birth every 3 seconds (0.29 births/second).

According to a recent report from VDC Research Group, the number of processor births per year topped 10 billion for the first time in 2008. Converting the timescale, that's a remarkable 21 processor births per second.

In aggregate, we're presently birthing 63+ processors for each new human. Wow.

But something doesn't add up about the 32 mobile phones/second estimate attributed to Motorola's Steinberg. Many mobile phones contain two or more processors. But even if we calculate just one processor per mobile, manufacturers would need over 14 billion new CPUs per year to keep up.

I'm not sure of the actual birth rate of mobile phones per second. But I'd be willing to guesstimate that new phones consume on the order of 5-20% of all new CPUs, for an approximate birth rate of 1-4 mobile phones per second.

Still impressive? Absolutely!