Month: May 2021

• 

  This slide from IBM's preview announcement gives more detail on the new process design. [credit: IBM ]

Thursday, IBM announced a breakthrough in integrated circuit design—the world's first 2 nanometer process. IBM says its new process can produce CPUs capable of either 45 percent higher performance, or 75 percent lower energy use than modern 7 nm designs.

If you've followed recent processor news, you're likely aware that Intel's current desktop processors are still laboring along at 14 nm, while the company struggles to complete a migration downward to 10 nm—and that its rivals are on much smaller processes, with the smallest production chips being Apple's new M1 processors at 5 nm. What's less clear is exactly what that means in the first place.

Originally, process size referred to the literal two-dimensional size of a transistor on the wafer itself—but modern 3D chip fabrication processes have made a hash of that. Foundries still refer to a process size in nanometers, but it's a "2D equivalent metric" only loosely coupled to reality, and its true meaning varies from one fabricator to the next.

Shot by Adam Lance Garcia and edited by Justin Sloan. Click here for transcript. (video link)

It's been a while since we last got to do an episode of "Unsolved Mysteries," our series wherein we ask creators to take us on a journey into the deeper and more mysterious aspects of their created universes (our most recent episode was about the unsolved mysteries of Mortal Kombat). But we had an opportunity fall into our laps that was just too good to pass up, though unlike our past couple of episodes, this one isn't (entirely) about video games.

This time, we're sitting down with author Dan Abnett to discuss some unsolved mysteries of the dark far-future Warhammer universe—and man, did he deliver.