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  • Hacker News
  • For anyone who needs it, a friendly reminder that CPU nm marketing is a complete fabrication and the physical size of transistors has zero relation to the marketing claims. These are not, in fact, physically sub 1 nm, despite the bombastic claims.
    by applfanboysbgon
  • So the title should be corrected. The did not debut sub nm chips at all.
    by micw
  • The marketing nm better represent the density and performance of the transistors than the actual feature size, especially in this case.
    by wmf
  • >These are not, in fact, physically sub 1 nm, despite the bombastic claims.

    Why? What's their real size?

    Not doubting you, just trying to understand and also trying to assess how exaggerated the marketing is.

    by lp4v4n
  • Keep hearing that IBM makes these incredible chips but don’t see anyone using IBM chips. What do they do with them?
    by victor106
  • usgov
    by jjk7
  • The product here is the research and licensing the tech.
    by kcb
  • Their line of POWER chips are used in their mainframes
    by ternaryoperator
  • Ericsson used a lot of power chips in their telecom hardware 10 years ago at least, haven't worked with their stuff since then so I haven't kept up.
    by reppap
  • Approximately everyone (at least in the F500) outside of Big Tech uses them. For example, Costco's entire inventory management system runs on IBM i (so, POWER). You can see the classic terminal look around the store. Banks run a TON of z and i. You'll never see them because they're essentially always in data centers, but I guarantee you interact with them even if it's very non-obvious because there's 50 microservices between the UI and the actual system of record.
    by xxpor
  • How does IBM commercialize this? Do they license this out to fabs?
    by giwook
  • Sit on a patent and try to scrape earnings from others, maybe? That is, license or litigate.
    by WaxProlix
  • boost sales for their systems division, POWER CPUs, mainframes, maybe Quantum stuff
    by evanjrowley
  • I’m sure they will license it. It’s better for them if everyone in the industry can innovate on everything around it. All the process tech companies will make it more cost effective, for instance, which helps IBM as well.
    by drob518
  • They licensed 2 nm to Rapidus so yes.
    by wmf
  • > Do they license this out to fabs?

    Broadly speaking yes, this is the business model. IBM has been at this for many years with technology transfers, licensing agreements, support and other arrangements. Rapidus, Samsung, GlobalFoundries, ST, SMIC, AMD, etc. have all used IBM R&D work at various times for various nodes and products.

    The cutting edge of semiconductors is a writhing mass of copulating tapeworms, and IBM lives deep inside that ball. For IBM, what this means is that when you buy one of the ASML machines to make products with this process, you'll pay IBM for the knowledge and support to actually get it working, or give them a cut, or something else, TBD, as circumstances warrant.

    by topspin
  • Why doesn't the industry use something like transistor density per cubic cm? This would extend to 3d cases and impossible to fake
    by elisbce
  • The industry does use a collection of more practical measurements, like transistor density. Marketing pieces for the news tend to use this kind of jargon precisely because it can be fudged & it sounds like it means something else than it really does to the average person. It's also simple enough to avoid needing to really explain what kinds of numbers are impressive etc, everyone just knows less than 1 nm is tiny and they've heard X nm for decades to compare to at this point.
    by zamadatix
  • Looking at this picture: https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_ibmnewsroom/201436/IBM...

    I am just astonished at the quality of the structure. Not only that, but the quality of the "cut" to then be able to take this picture. I was closely involved in EM imaging more than 30 years ago, this is just wonderful to see such pictures now.

    by Loic
  • I understand the general area of "small imaging and manipulation" is something IBM has been working on for a very long time. This is STM from 1989:

    https://sciencephotogallery.com/featured/ibm-atom-manipulati...

    by yencabulator
  • One of the images has "15 rows of Si atoms".

    Is there a limit to how small things can go? A single atom?

    Is there a physical/molecular limit to Moore's Law?

    by throw0101d
  • I mean, you can't get smaller than an atom, there is some amount of plausibility of using individual atoms as at least the occasional computing element.

    Beyond that, engineering a quark-gluon plasma as a processor? I'd watch that Star Trek episode. (we might fantasize about stuff like that but we're roughly monkeys smashing rocks together in a cave vs. building an iPhone sort of gap away from that kind of thing unless somebody has a really good idea)

    by colechristensen
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_Plenty_of_Room_at_th...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

    by wmf
  • Yes, and we're already there. We've been there for quite a while, in fact.

    Once you make the gate of a transistor small/thin enough, quantum effects take over. Electrons will randomly teleport into and through the gate causing the transistor to conduct when it shouldn't. I don't have numbers to hand, but it's on the order of a few atoms wide. There's really nothing that can be done about it either, as far as we know. Electrons just aren't physical objects at this scale, you can't simply exclude them from any given volume of space. The electron wave function will simply just appear wherever it wants (within the electron probability cloud). The only way to stop it is to make your insulating junction thicker than the probability cloud.

    by vitally3643
  • Remember that IBM paid Global Foundries $1.5 billion to take their fabs and design services group.

    GF did not pay IBM. IBM paid GF to take the fabs away.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/ibm-to-pay-global...

    by lizknope
  • It was 15 years ago. Whole management got replaced, they are quite ambitious. Let's see if how this works out now.
    by d3m0t3p
  • The most surprising part for me is that IBM still somehow owns silicon labs, I was sure it's effectively a consulting company by now
    by alexey-salmin
  • The labs might not be that different from consulting, the NYT reporting on this notes they run R&D labs so they can license the tech they develop to people who actually make chips.
    by turtletontine
  • IBM has been the company with the most patent registrations in the US for I think 29 of the last 30 years. They're one of the largest industrial research organizations in the world. They're doing more hard science research than almost anyone else.
    by Barrin92
  • Most of their fabs were divested to GlobalFoundries, but they still have pretty significant fab capability and capacity- I suspect at least partly to have a us-based chip-making for military ("Trusted Foundry").
    by dekhn