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IBM has announced a new ultra-dense chip that has four times as much computing power than anything else currently on the market.
The company said it has used silicon-germanium in the manufacturing process rather than pure silicon. This results in the transistors being able to switch faster and sit more densely on the chip.
IBM says the chips are currently in the ‘advanced research’ stage, meaning they’re not quite consumer-ready yet. The company said that it had working samples of chips with seven-nanometer transistors.
Just to compare the seven-nanometer transistors, a strand of DNA is around 2.5 nanometers in diameter and a red blood cell is about 7,500 nanometers in diameter.
IBM believes it will be possible to build microprocessors with more than 20 billion transistors.
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