Abating concerns of slowed innovation, tech giant IBM announced on Thursday that it had created a new computer chip with approximately four times the processing power of today’s top models. Though there are now working models of the new chip, IBM has not yet revealed when it might be available for commercial use.
The new chip features seven-nanometer transistors, half of the 14-nanometer transistors that are currently the industry standard. This innovation removes Moore’s law—which states that the transistors in a densely integrated circuit will double every two years—from jeopardy through at least 2018. IBM now believes it will be capable of building microprocessors with 20 billion transistors.
IBM says that the new chip was made possible in part by utilizing silicon-germanium rather than pure silicon.
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