Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
Qualcomm has announced a new low-end processor for cell phones and IoT devices, the Snapdragon 4 gen 2. What’s interesting is that they have announced that this model is decreasing the size of the transistors from 6 to 4 nanometers, which is bonkers.
The announced features include the usual: faster functioning, better battery life, lower heat. What is not discussed is how in the world Qualcomm was able to do this, because 5 nm was always supposed to be the theoretical physical limit of transistor size.
Anything smaller and you run the risk of quantum tunneling, which basically means that electrons just do what they want, and to hell with your boring human concept of 1’s and 0’s.
This is still a much smaller processor than a standard CPU, of course, but its going to be interesting to see how designs progress as we head towards a (still theoretical) 2nm build by as soon as next year.