Top SA computer scientist on IBM’s chip breakthrough
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IBM has announced a sub-1nm (0.7nm / 7-angstrom) chip design that packs nearly 100 billion transistors onto a fingernail-sized surface — roughly double the density of its 2021 2nm chip — with up to 50% more performance or 70% better energy efficiency. The key innovation is a 3D 'nanostack' architecture that stacks transistors vertically rather than shrinking them further. A South African quantum computing expert, Francesco Petruccione of NITheCS and Stellenbosch University, calls it a genuine engineering milestone and highlights implications for AI workloads, data centre energy costs, and on-device AI. IBM also reports a ~40% improvement in on-chip SRAM, easing the memory bottleneck for AI inference. Commercial production is estimated within five years, though significant manufacturing challenges remain.
