IBM's new 2-nanometer chip technology could dramatically improve performance and power consumption in everything from servers to smartphones. (Image: IBM)
IBM (IBM) on Thursday debuted the world’s first 2-nanometer chip making technology, which could enable massive performance gains in terms of both power and battery life over the current industry-leading processors found in everything from smartphones and tablets to the massive computer servers that power the cloud.
“Right now, in the most advanced production in the world is about the 7-nm node, you know on the verge of getting to 5-nm node,” Darío Gil, SVP and director of IBM Research, told Yahoo Finance.
“What we're talking about here is the first time in the world that anybody has shown, externally, that there's a viable technology to enable the 2-nm node.”
A chip’s nanometer size refers to the length of its transistors. Transistors are the most basic part of a processor and allow for the on and off signals that make up the 1s and 0s of binary instructions, the foundation of all computer code.