The fingernail-sized memory chip is etched with 1 billion transistors that are only 45 nanometers wide — about 1,000 times smaller than a red blood cell, said Mark Bohr, a leading Intel engineer.
“It will pack about two times as many transistors per unit area and use less power. It will help future products and platforms deliver improved performance,” Bohr told Reuters in an interview.
Intel, which makes more than 80 percent of the processors that drive personal computers, was on track to start making computer processors with the technology in the second half of 2007, Bohr said.
Asked if the engineer’s quest for ever-smaller chips would soon start bumping up against the limits of what is physically possible, Bohr said: “I think it will continue for some time. It won’t ever really end, it will evolve, and scaling will go on in some fashion we’re not used to.”
And to paraphrase John, Moore’s Law is whatever you feel like establishing as a production goal, this year.
It figures someone named Bohr would be involved with something that small. (for those that don’t know Neils Bohr was a great particle physicist during WWII and developed a well known model of the atom.)
Smaller size means less current which means less heat which means more transistors which means more horsepower. I guess it sounds like a good idea. But can it make coffee?