IBM’s minuscule new computer chip could cut energy use by 75 per cent

By Matthew Sparkes

IBM has built a working computer processor with 50 billion transistors in an area the size of a fingernail, making it the smallest computer chip architecture yet produced. If it is adopted for use in data centres and consumer electronics, it could slash the vast amount of energy required for computing.

The computer chip manufacturing industry names generations of chip technology by size class, though these don’t refer to the actual size of the chip. New commercial devices tend to use 7-nanometre or 5-nanometre chips. For instance, Apple’s M1 chip in its current range of computers and its A14 chip …