Intel’s Broadwell chips are late. The 14-nanometer wafers, which are believed to be integral to the much-rumored Retina MacBook Air, are due soon, but still not here.
But Intel’s already looking forward. At this week’s 2015 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the chipmaker will announce a switch to a 10-nanometer process by early 2017 and to 7-nanometer chips shortly thereafter … a transition that means your Mac’s guts will soon no longer be made out of silicon, but another material entirely.
This is a little bit of a simplification, but in CPU fabrication, the smaller a process in nanometers, the faster and more efficiently it can run. So a 32-nanometer chip has the potential to run at a higher chip speed while using less power than a 45-nanometer chip. Right now, Macs use 22-nanometer Intel chips, with 14-nanometer chips rumored to come soon. But according to Intel’s latest announcement, the first chips to use their 10-nanometer process will arrive in late 2016 or early 2017.
That’s a big step up. And even more interestingly? Future Macs might not have silicon chips at all.
After teasing for the better part of a decade that chips are getting too fast for silicon, Intel is now officially warning partners that whatever their 7-nanometer chips are made of, it will probably be a different material. Wikipedia says the most likely replacement is a semiconductor like indium gallium arsenide, although time will tell. Either way, expect it to be fast, fast, fast.
All of this is a little far off at this point. With Intel’s Broadwell chips still delayed, it seems a little premature to worry about their successor. But one thing’s for sure: Unless Apple switches to ARM for the Mac, we’ve got some lightning-fast Macs to look forward to in the future.
Via: Ars Technica
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
7 responses to “Future Macs won’t run on silicon chips”
Graphene will start to make an appearance soon & the possibilities will be endless! Doesn’t get much thinner than one atom… maybe half an atom?
Impossible.
Tell that to Uranium 235.
You might be confusing that with half-life.
They are not the same. Half-life is the amount of time for 50% of the atoms to decay/change into another atom. Not for it to be divided in half.
Not half life. U235 can easy be split in two, therefore creating two half atoms. :) I know a great deal about nuclear physics having worked in that industry for many years. It’s a play on words. Humor is so lost on some.
Ah, nuclear fission…
Those are some intense speculations you got. And ‘Unless Apple switches to ARM for the Mac, we’ve got some lightning-fast Macs to look forward to in the future.’ Why wont ARM be able to match or even the performance when these futuristic long-awaited Intel chips finally arrive?