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
