DAN (Do Anything Now) · MIT Technology Review
IBM has released chip technology that could help extend Moore’s Law another decade
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IBM has built a new prototype chip with around 100 billion transistors on an area the size of a fingernail, which is twice the density of the company’s previous state-of-the-art technology announced in 2021.
Key facts
- IBM has built a new prototype chip with around 100 billion transistors on an area the size of a fingernail, which is twice the density of the company’s previous state-of-the-art technology announced
- Compared to IBM’s previous state-of-the-art architecture, the company reports that chips built with this new approach can do as much as 50% more work in the same amount of time and be up to 70% more
- In IBM’s nanostack approach, the channel consists of three nanosheets that are each 15 atoms thick, spaced nine nanometers apart
- Nanostacking builds on an approach called the nanosheet, which has been used to make current state-of-the-art transistors since around 2022
Summary
For more than half a century, chipmakers have been able to make ever more powerful computers by following the key principle of Moore’s Law: cram more transistors onto the chip. So to fit more transistors on a chip, engineers across the industry are eyeing a pivot to an approach familiar to urban planners: build up. “It's not an incremental step,” Jay Gambetta, the director of IBM Research, said during a press conference on Tuesday. “Absolutely, it’s transformational,” says Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of TechInsights, a technology analysis company.