IBM puts 50B transistors on a single chip

Don’t ever doubt Moore’s Law, folks. It is still alive and well.

IBM’s announcement today that it has create a new chip that achieves 45 percent higher performance and 75 percent lower energy use.

Moore’s Law, named for Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel co-founder, holds that the number of transistors on chips doubles nearly every two years.

The company said that the chip has 2 nanometer nanosheet technology or 2 nm, while the current most advanced chips at 7nm chips.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t understand what that means but IBM claims they can now but 50 billion transistors on a chip the size of a fingernail.

“The innovation reflected in this new chip is essential to the creation of new, more powerful technology platforms that can help our society address major challenges, from climate change and sustainability to food scarcity,” said Dario Gil, SVP and director of IBM Research, in a company release.

By increasing the number of transistors per chip can make them smaller, faster, more reliable and more efficient, IBM said.

Some of the benefits IBM touted in its announcement include reducing the carbon footprint of data centers, because using the 2 nm chips means a data center would need fewer servers. And the servers would be more energy efficient as well.

Cell phone battery life could quadruple, meaning theoretically you could go four day without charging your phone.

The reaction time of autonomous vehicles would improve because the chips are faster.

AI and cloud computing applications are probably the areas that would likely feel the most impact in the federal market.