Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

newsroom.ibm.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 217 posts

Re: IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

#71

Post by superjan »

vitally3643 wrote: post #55
colechristensen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you can't get smaller than an atom, there is some amount of plausibility of using individual atoms as at least the occasional computing element. Beyond that, engineering a quark-gluon plasma as a processor? I'd watch that Star Trek episode. (we might fantasize about stuff like that but we're roughly monkeys smashing rocks together in a cave vs. building an iPhone sort of gap away from that kind of thing unles…

You could, in principle, use photons and/or electrons. We got pretty damn close in the vacuum tube era, and photonic computing has been a popular research topic for a while. You also have quantum computing, which I think can/does use subatomic particles? Not sure about that one

You can’t make smaller chips features with photonics. Visible light photons have a wavelength between 400 and 800 nm, much larger than current chip features. When you go to higher frequencies they get smaller, but they are really difficult to produce and control.

Re: IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

#72

Post by kailden »

gabrielhidasy wrote: post #67
adrian_b wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it can be seen from the photos, horizontally the features are much bigger than 5 nm. For silicon, the gate length of a FET has a lower limit somewhere between 10 nm and 15 nm. The current CMOS manufacturing processes have not reached the limit yet. For making smaller transistors, a transition to other semiconductor materials will be necessary. The vertical thicknesses of various layers may be of only a few nanomet…

Just get better marketers to say your 2nm process has more gates per sqmm than your competition 1nm process.

Exactly. WatsonX AI quantum angstroms for e-business.

Re: IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

#73

Post by Barrin92 »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #70

The most surprising part for me is that IBM still somehow owns silicon labs, I was sure it's effectively a consulting company by now

IBM has been the company with the most patent registrations in the US for I think 29 of the last 30 years. They're one of the largest industrial research organizations in the world. They're doing more hard science research than almost anyone else.

Re: IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

#74

Post by turtletontine »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #70

The most surprising part for me is that IBM still somehow owns silicon labs, I was sure it's effectively a consulting company by now

The labs might not be that different from consulting, the NYT reporting on this notes they run R&D labs so they can license the tech they develop to people who actually make chips.

Re: IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

#75

Post by wmf »

monirmamoun wrote: post #64

Two big problems 1) NOBODY knows what IBM's definition of "sub 1nm" means 2) IBM bullshits so much more than anyone including Intel (remember the "teleportation" ads years ago) that nobody is going to waste time researching what they mean in reality

I know what it means. Something isn't automatically bullshit because it's outside your field of expertise.

Re: IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

#76

Post by dekhn »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #70

The most surprising part for me is that IBM still somehow owns silicon labs, I was sure it's effectively a consulting company by now

Most of their fabs were divested to GlobalFoundries, but they still have pretty significant fab capability and capacity- I suspect at least partly to have a us-based chip-making for military ("Trusted Foundry").

Re: IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

#78

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

vitally3643 wrote: post #55
colechristensen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you can't get smaller than an atom, there is some amount of plausibility of using individual atoms as at least the occasional computing element. Beyond that, engineering a quark-gluon plasma as a processor? I'd watch that Star Trek episode. (we might fantasize about stuff like that but we're roughly monkeys smashing rocks together in a cave vs. building an iPhone sort of gap away from that kind of thing unles…

You could, in principle, use photons and/or electrons. We got pretty damn close in the vacuum tube era, and photonic computing has been a popular research topic for a while. You also have quantum computing, which I think can/does use subatomic particles? Not sure about that one

It depends on the type of quantum computer. In some a physical qubit is a single atom, but then to make it reliable they need to add error correction resulting in logical qubits consisting of at least 100 or so physical qubits.

Another type of quantum computer uses qubits consisting of "quantum circuits" which are actually huge macroscopic constructions (> 1mm).

Re: IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

#80

Post by jadar »

Just to be clear, this doesn't mean that anything on the die actually measures 0.7nm — it means that it's roughly double the density as the previous node generation. At some point the industry decided to keep talking about "nanometers" even though the actual transistor sizes have been decoupled from the node name for years.
Post reply on HN