IBM Overtakes Intel: Designs Ultra-Dense Computer Chip That Is 4 Times More Powerful Than Current Most Powerful Chips

International Business Machines Corp. IBM announced on Thursday that it has designed working versions of ultra-dense computer chip. The company claims that these chips would be nearly 4 times more powerful than the best computer chips that are currently manufactured by competitors like Intel Corporation INTC.

Brett Molina, USA Today tech reporter, was on CNBC recently to weigh in on this.

Pretty Big Step

"Well this would be the first 7 nanometre chip," Molina began. "To put it into perspective a lot of the modern devices that we use, use a 14 nanometre chip and the industry is already kind of making the movement towards 10 nanometre. So, it's already this new chip that IBM has unveiled has already skipped a generation. And the most important part of this is, it's about half the size, but it's going to provide about twice the performance of today's chips. So, it's a pretty big step."

Vast Improvement Over What We Use Currently

Molina was asked what this high-performance chip means for the consumers. He replied, "Well, it means you are going to get a smaller devices and just electronics in general that are going to perform a lot faster, that are going to consume less battery and they are just going to work more efficiently and also because these chips are a lot smaller they are going to allow room for more transistors."

"[And that] basically just allows your computer, your smartphone to just operate more quickly and that chip takes up a lot less space...It's going to be a while before these chips come out maybe a couple of years or so. But you are definitely going to see vast improvements compared to what we use," Molina concluded.