IBM has unveiled new semiconductor chips with the smallest transistors ever made. The new 2-nanometer (nm) tech allows the company to cram a staggering 50 billion transistors onto a chip the size of a fingernail. Current industry standards are for chips with 7-nm transistors, with some high-end consumer devices beginning to make the move to 5 nm. And experimental chips have shrunk as small as 2.5nm.
IBM’s new chips beat them all, with transistors now measuring just 2 nm wide – for reference, that’s narrower than a strand of human DNA. That, of course, means the tiny transistors can be squeezed onto a chip far more densely than ever before, boosting the device’s processing power and energy efficiency in the process.
The company claims that, when compared to current 7-nm chips, the new 2-nm chips can reach 45 percent higher performance with 75 percent lower energy use.
2 nm is quite the feat of engineering. As recently as 2019, engineers expressed concerns that technology wouldn’t allow much progress to be made smaller than 3 nm. Research by many companies over the past few years have put those concerns to rest.
It’s likely that we won’t see these 2-nm chips in consumer electronics until 2023 at the earliest, so for now go enjoy the benefits of the still-impressive 5-nm chips.
