IBM successfully built the world’s most powerful 2-nanometer chip

IBM has just announced that it has successfully built the chip on a 2 nanometer (2 nm) process. This is the smallest but most powerful chip ever in the world.
According to IBM, its new microprocessor is the smallest and most powerful ever developed, the size of a fingernail but contains up to 50 billion transistors. The 2-nanometer chips will enter commercial production starting at the end of 2024 or 2025. However, this will not be early enough to alleviate the current global shortage of chips.

IBM’s 2 nm chip had a density of 333 million transistors per square millimeter. By comparison, TSMC’s most advanced chip with a 5 nm process has about 173 million transistors, while Samsung’s 5 nm chip is 127 transistors per square millimeter. Billions of transistors are found on each microprocessor, and the size of the transistor is measured in nanometers. The smaller the size, the more transistors the processor can hold, making it faster and more energy efficient. IBM successfully built a chip with a size of only 2 nm but the most powerful in the world. Most of the processor chips found on personal computers or smartphones today are manufactured using a 7 nm or 10 nm process. For example, the 7-nm Apple A13 Bionic chip has 8.5 billion transistors. Meanwhile, the A14 Bionic microprocessor manufactured on a 5 nm process is integrated with 11.8 billion transistors. More transistors on a chip give manufacturers more options to deliver core innovations, to improve performance for leading tasks like AI and cloud computing, and pave the way for security. Cryptography and encryption are hardware-enforced. The need to increase performance and save energy in every processor has never cooled, especially in the era of the cloud, AI and IoT. The 2 nm chip technology is estimated to achieve 45% higher efficiency, 75% lower energy use than the advanced 7nm chips currently on the market.