IBM announced on Thursday that their $3 billion research alliance with Samsung, and GlobalFoundries was more than fruitful! IBM’s new state-of-the-art chip can boost the computing power of smartphones, and even spacecrafts.
Research took place at the State University of New York – Albany.
The seven nanometer chip holds more than 20 billion tiny switches of transistors that will vastly improve computing power. It comes right in the nick of time – the world is preparing for cloud-computing, and Big Data systems, cognitive computing, and other emerging technologies.
The Human Brain Project comes to mind – and researchers across the world must feel like these new seven nanometer chips are a divine gift.
Your average chips, that you use on a daily basis without giving a thought how important they are, can be found in your average PCs, and devices. They are between 14, and 22 nanometers. This breakthrough tech of seven nanometer chips is ” […] at least a 50% power-performance improvement.”
Michael Liehr, which is the the university’s vice president of innovation and research notes that – ” Enabling the first 7nm node transistors is a significant milestone for the entire semiconductor industry as we continue to push beyond the limitations of our current capabilities,”
IBM’s new seven nanometer chips are the size of a human blood cell – it kinda’ puts things in perspective when you think about how much power something so tiny outputs.
To go further into the one might say surreal technology – IBM’s seven nanometer chip is 100,000 smaller than the width of a human hair. Everything that is under 500 nanometers is invisible to the human eye, and one requires an electron microscope in order to see it.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noted that chip performance will increase, doubling its performance output, once every 18 months. Now known as Moore’s Law, it has held true for many, many decades, but Gordon also said that this trend cannot continue forever, and sometime, in the near future, progress will slow down.
Experts agree with him, and some actually say that progress will actually stop because our political, economical, health, and etc. advancements are stalling.
Some even go full sci-fi and bring into discussion that earthly materials might limit our technological advancements.
But as IBM, and its researches showed us, you can get passed the physical limitations of existing materials, and find a loop-hole. In order for the seven nanometer chips to be built, researchers developed silicon-germanium transistors to boost the processing power.
It all sounds like something out of an Asimov tale, but rest assured, IBM’s new chips will find their place in our homes pretty soon.
