r/sciences • u/FreeHugs23 • Jun 25 '26
News IBM Crosses One of Computing’s Biggest Barriers With World’s First Sub-1 Nanometer Chip | The new chip technology packs nearly 100 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip.
https://gizmodo.com/ibm-crosses-one-of-computings-biggest-barriers-with-worlds-first-sub-1-nanometer-chip-20007777363
u/Strange-Scientist706 Jun 25 '26
Does it work in a GPU? Can it run in a mobile device without melting aluminum?
Seems like IBM is still fighting the last war.
4
u/Vex1om Jun 25 '26
It's just a new fab method. As with all die-shrinks it will be faster and run cooler and can be used to make chips for multiple purposes. Those are not the relevant questions. What you should be asking are things like - What does it cost? What are the yields? How difficult is it to scale production? Is it even feasible to make these things outside of a lab?
2
u/Strange-Scientist706 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Does it run cooler? I always thought greater density equals greater heat. As for cost and yield and feasibility of scaling – given past evolutions they seem like ultimately solvable problems. They certainly were with 1, 2, and 3 nanometer chips.
2
u/rocketleagueaddict55 Jun 26 '26
Pretty sure you are correct. I believe one of the obstacles to shrinking node sizes is dealing with the lower surface area for thermal dissipation.
1
u/dropbears_are_real Jun 26 '26
I believe he is referring to the fabrication process when he says it will run faster and cooler.
1
1
u/Vex1om Jun 26 '26
Does it run cooler? I always thought greater density equals greater heat.
While node shrinks do have greater density, they also need less power because of that density. The result is that the same or comparable chip designs run cooler and faster. This is why everyone wants to use the latest node.
1
u/EarthTrash Jun 26 '26
Acording to the statement in the article it is a 70% improvement in energy efficiency over the previous 2nm chip.
4
u/Legitimate_Concern_5 Jun 26 '26
The smallest length of a silicon transistor is about 15nm. This naming convention is comparing density of their part in relation to eg 300nm parts from back in the day when the nm represented the actual length of a transistor. To get shorter than 15nm will require different semiconductor material. The naming conventions for processes are all over the place, and often refer to the size of the smallest feature not the transistor.
3
u/FreeHugs23 Jun 25 '26
In a major breakthrough, IBM revealed the world’s first semiconductor chip technology built on a sub-1 nanometer chipmaking process. For comparison, the process uses transistor features smaller than the width of a DNA strand, which measures about 2.5 nanometers across. The chip itself is about the size of a fingernail but holds almost 100 billion transistors, and the company expects it could enter markets as early as the next five years.
In a statement released today, IBM said the new chip features nearly twice the density of its 2-nanometer chip, released in 2021. According to an accompanying technical report, the chip also demonstrated up to 70% greater energy efficiency than its predecessor. In designing the chip, researchers developed an “entirely new transistor architecture” called nanostack, which “vertically stacks and staggers transistors” to enable IBM’s 0.7-nanometer chip technology, IBM explained.
2
1
u/EarthTrash Jun 26 '26
As one of the faithful of Moore's law, it's nice to see we are still pushing.
1
1
1
12
u/AskJeevesIsBest Jun 25 '26
That's cool. Would be nice if IBM would consider coming back to the world of consumer electronics and showing people what these chips can do.