An old friend asked me, Hey Jon, how many pixels do you think there are in the world? TV’s, PC’s, smart phones, tablets. It’s going to be a lot! But how many?
How many are there?
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| 21 quadrillon pixels |
Twenty-one quadrillion, six hundred and thirty-four trillion pixels in use today:
21,634,876,802,016,700.00 |
To start the analysis, I started with what was shipped in 2017—2.1 billion GPUs. I’ve only counted bit-mapped displayed pixels, no LED dot matrix displays.
| GPU Shipments |
Then I made an estimate of the average screen resolution for all those devices, and to make life manageable I assumed HD was best size. So then, it’s 2 million pixels times 2.1 billion devices, or 4.3 trillion, just in 2017.
Now if we estimate the installed base (5 years average) and make the resolution VGA to HD over ten years, we get 19 quadrillion pixels illuminating the world today. And, in 2021 it will be 35 quadrillion.
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| Number of pixels in the world |
Included in this total are Smartphones & Tablets, TVs, Handhelds, Arcade, PCs, Vehicles with displays, Digital cinemas, Signage and others. Not included are IoT because quite frankly I don’t know how to estimate that.
The change from 2017 to 2018 is one hundred and thirty-five million new pixels a second – 135.197 M pixels/sec.
Chase that! – Jon Peddie
This article is re-published with kind permission of Dr Jon Peddie and was originally published in ‘Jon Peddie’s Techwatch‘ Jon has recently a book “Augmented Reality: Where We Will All Live” published by Springer and available on Amazon.
