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Here Comes the World’s First 2 Nanometer Chip
Just as I was thinking about my cell phone battery going downhill, I learned that IBM recently managed to create a 2 nanometer (nm) chip. The geek in me is excited since this is an industry-first and a huge breakthrough in the processor world since it’s the smallest chip so far and is expected to offer many benefits.
IBM claims this new chip can improve performance by 45 percent over the current 7nm chip, and uses 75 percent less energy to match current performance. So what does this mean? According to IBM’s press release, the potential benefits could include:
- Quadrupling cell phone battery life, only requiring users to charge their devices every four days (my personal favorite).
- Slashing the carbon footprint of data centers, which account for one percent of global energy use. Changing all of their servers to 2 nm-based processors could potentially reduce that number significantly.
- Drastically speeding up laptop functions, ranging from quicker processing in applications to assisting in easier language translation, to faster internet access.
- Contributing to faster object detection and reaction time in autonomous vehicles (self-driving cars).
To put this in perspective: 50 billion transistors will fit on a fingernail-sized chip! Increasing the number of transistors per chip can make them smaller, faster, more reliable, and more efficient. The 2 nm design demonstrates the advanced scaling of semiconductors using IBM’s nanosheet technology. Its architecture is an industry first, and as it was developed less than four years after IBM announced its milestone 5 nm design, this latest breakthrough allows the 2 nm chip to fit on the size of a fingernail.
More transistors on a chip also mean processor designers have additional options to infuse core-level innovations to improve capabilities for leading-edge workloads such as AI and cloud computing, as well as new pathways for hardware-enforced security and encryption. I can’t wait to see how these 2 nm chips will get integrated into our daily lives!
