IBM makes chip design breakthrough with 3D architecture, would reach AI chips by 2030

Good news! Good old big blue is alive and kicking! From mainframes to AI!

"IBM announced the first sub-1 nanometer chip technology, with transistor nodes measuring just 0.7 nanometers wide. The breakthrough allows designers to cram nearly 100 billion transistors into a fingernail-sized chip, about 10,000 times denser than a red blood cell is wide.

Performance jumps are substantial: The chips deliver 70 percent better efficiency or 50 percent more power than IBM’s previous 2nm designs, and researchers estimate AI accelerators built with the technology could hit 9,000 TOPS, six times today’s leading hardware.

The advance relies on what IBM calls “nanostack” architecture, which stacks transistors vertically rather than just shrinking them in two dimensions, along with breakthroughs in wafer bonding and a 40 percent increase in on-chip SRAM capacity. IBM expects the nanostack design to anchor at least a decade of silicon innovation, though widespread adoption is still years away. (IBM)"

"... IBM announced it's once again unveiling the smallest, most powerful computer chip technology in the world. These are the first sub-1 nanometer node chips, designed with transistor nodes that are just 0.7 nanometers, or 7 angstroms, wide. That makes them the smallest transistors in the world — by some margin. ..."

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https://research.ibm.com/blog/sub-1nm-node-chips "It’s the world’s first 0.7nm chip technology. Powered by IBM’s new nanostack architecture, this structure will pave the way for more powerful and efficient chips for years to come. This is the architecture to accelerate the Angstrom era."