IBM has hit a major milestone, being the first company to announce 2nm chips.
While IBM is in the process of transitioning to a company focused on hybrid cloud services, it nonetheless has a long history of semiconductor design. The company currently makes two lines of commercial chips, the Power series for Linux and Unix servers, and the zArchitecture for mainframes.
The current leader is TSMC, with its 5nm designs, although AMD will be moving to 5nm this fall. Meanwhile, Intel is struggling to even reach 7nm. Although IBM says the new chips won’t be available for four years, there will be significant benefits to the new design.
In particular, the new chips will quadruple cell phone battery life, only requiring a charge every four days. The chips will also offer significant advancement for autonomous vehicles, speed up laptops and slash the carbon footprint of data centers.
“The IBM innovation reflected in this new 2 nm chip is essential to the entire semiconductor and IT industry,” said Darío Gil, SVP and Director of IBM Research. “It is the product of IBM’s approach of taking on hard tech challenges and a demonstration of how breakthroughs can result from sustained investments and a collaborative R&D ecosystem approach.”