IBM has said it has built an ultra-dense 7-nanometer chip that delivers four times the compute power than what’s currently available today.
The processor, which uses transistors only about three times larger than a strand of DNA, is being developed in partnership with GlobalFoundries, Samsung and SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering.
The chip will be used to power a variety of products, according to IBM, including its Watson supercomputer, cloud data centres and mainframes.
Big Blue said it has earmarked $3bn in research and development over the next five years to bring the chips to market.
IBM competes with Intel when it comes to database server processors and architecture. While Intel dominates the market with its x86 chips, IBM has developed its Power8 microprocessor platform in conjunction with efforts of the OpenPower Foundation, whose members include industry heavyweights such as Google, Nvidia and Rackspace.
A 7-nanometer microprocessor bests dominant chip maker Intel’s current commercial 14-nanometer Broadwell processors, unveiled in June. IBM said it was able to accomplish the 7-nanometer milestone by using a silicon-germanium alloy instead of silicon to make molecular-size switches.
For its part, Intel, has maintained it’s on a path to 7-nanometer processors.
The battle to build smaller processors is an important one in the semiconductor industry, which for years has struggled to keep pace with Moore’s Law, which predicted that the number of transistors in a microprocessor would double every two years.
