IBM's New Chip Fits Nearly 100 Billion Transistors in the Size of a Fingernail

IBM's newest chip has transistors smaller than one nanometer. But it could pack a powerful punch in future data centers.

2 min read

IBM on Thursday unveiled the first chip created using its latest semiconductor technologies, one that holds nearly 100 billion transistors in a fleck of hardware no bigger than your fingernail. Packing more transistors into a die the same size or smaller than previous generations is an essential part of increasing power efficiency and speed.

The new chip is 0.7 nanometers, smaller than IBM's two-nanometer chip that was first unveiled in 2021. But the circuitry of the new chip has been significantly adjusted. That older, larger process laid the transistors flat in what IBM Research called nanosheets, as CNET reported in 2021. Now, the new 0.7nm chip uses IBM's recently developed nanostack architecture, which stacks the nanosheets vertically.

IBM says the new architecture results in better performance....

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