Central Processing Units (CPU’s) have come a long way from the old 286 and 386 ones found in many PC’s pre-1990 (and before). Well, Moore (the guy who made a law about how technology would increase) stated that it would happen, and the exponential growth continues.

When we talk about CPU’s there are a few important aspects that we should be concerned with; well actually there are many things, but not now – I don’t want to bore you with too much detail. So there are two important aspects: the Speed (GHz) and the nanometres, which refer directly to the transistors.
A transistor is basically a small switch (measured in nanometres – nm) and it is a fairly simple concept: computers speak in binary, which consists of just 0’s and 1’s, and these are represented as off or on the transistor. Combining them in certain configurations make up the words we speak. So, in terms of performance, the smaller the transistors, the more of then you can fit on a CPU and therefore the faster the CPU will run because it can hand more information at one point. At present the most transistors on a CPU is 2.6 billion on a 10 core Xeon CPU (from Intel) with each transistor being 32nm.

Now, although that is a lot, a group of researchers have managed to create a 2nm transistor, and what this basically means that instead of 2.6 billion on a CPU, we looking at around 41.6 billion on a CPU which has the same dimensions, meaning a seriously fast CPU: about 16 times faster than Intel’s Xeon CPU!

A small transistor also means that it uses less power which has great prospects for any mobile device that we may use, less power consumption means greater battery life, so instead of that 8 hour tablet you’re looking at more like 10-12 hours – sound good? I think so.

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