海角大神

IBM has created a computer chip with roughly four times the capacity of today鈥檚 most powerful chips, The New York Times reports.

These tiny but powerful chips will help "produce the next generations of servers and storage systems for cloud computing, big data analytics, and cognitive computing," writes IBM VP聽Mukesh Khare on IBM's Smarter Planet blog.

The new chips are some of the first to be made with 7 nanometer transistors 鈥� half the size of those commonly used today, reports TIME.

A nanometer is about聽1/10,000^th the width of a human hair, explains聽Supratik Guha, IBM Research鈥檚 director of physical science, so about聽20,000 transistors will fit on a chip the size of a fingernail.

What's the secret? Changing materials聽from pure silicon to silicon-germanium. The switch allows transistors to use less power and sit more densely on a chip.

The manufacturing process also uses "extreme ultraviolet," a form of lithography that companies have struggled to perfect for more than two decades, according to The Wall Street Journal.

鈥淚鈥檓 not surprised, because this is exactly what the road map predicted, but this is fantastic,鈥� Subhashish Mitra, an electrical engineer at Stanford University, told The New York Times.

But it will take time for consumers to see results in the gadgets they use everyday.

Chips that take advantage of the 7 nanometer production process won't become commercially available聽for several years, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Nevertheless, the new development will help IBM and their manufacturing partners put pressure on competitors like Intel.

IBM has committed to spending $3 billion on chip research and development, according to their blog. Developing this new, submicroscopic transistor means that Moore鈥檚 Law, which says computer power should double every couple of years, can still hold true, despite earlier worries that chip makers were nearing the limit of transistor density in processors.