16.07.2021 – 10:27
The new chip is expected to achieve 45% performance
The constant challenge of the industry is to make microchips that are smaller and at the same time faster, more powerful and more energy efficient.
On Thursday, IBM announced that it has created a 2-nanometer chip, the smallest and most powerful microchip ever developed.
Most power supply devices for computer chips today use 10-nanometer or 7-nanometer process technology, with some manufacturers producing 5-nanometer chips. Lower numbers indicate smaller, more advanced processors. IBM’s new chip uses 2-nanometer process technology, a major step forward for the components used to supply everything from consumer phones and smart devices to supercomputers and transportation equipment.
The way to improve the performance of a chip is to increase the number of transistors, the essential elements that process data, without increasing its overall size. The new 2-nanometer chips are about the size of a fingernail and contain 50 billion transistors, each about the size of two strands of DNA, according to study vice president Mukesh Khare of IBM.
Having more transistors will also allow more innovations related to artificial intelligence and encryption, among others, to be added directly to the chip.
The new chip is expected to achieve 45% higher performance and about 75% lower power consumption than today’s more advanced 7-nanometer chips, writes a2news. With the 2 nanometer chip, cell phone batteries can last four times longer, laptops can become significantly faster and data center carbon footprints can be broken as they rely on more energy efficient chip.
2 nanometer chips are expected to go into production starting at the end of 2024 or 2025.
