What's the Latest Development? Intel has created a commercial
computer chip which runs 37% faster than previous chips and
matches their processing power using half the energy. Called Ivy
Bridge, the chip maintains a trend known as Moore's Law which
has predicted the doubling of computer power every two years,
achieved by the doubling of transistors, since 1975.
"Transistors on an Ivy Bridge processor are packed roughly twice
as densely as in the most recent line of Intel chips, with 1.4
billion on a 160 square millimeter die instead of 1.16 billion
on a 212 square millimeter die." Features on the chip are as
small as 22 nanometers across. What's the Big Idea? To maintain
Moore's Law, Intel had to substantially redesign the transistor,
the tiny electronic switches that make up a computer chip.
Previously, packing transistors into a tighter arrangement
caused them to leak, meaning the chip would overheat. This led
many to predict to the end of Moore's Law and the end of
consumers' expectations for ever-faster c