Intel Has 7nm & 5nm in R&D Pipeline

When a company like Intel releases a brand-new micro-architecture, it’s pretty-much become a given that we’ll be impressed. Sometimes, performance sees a nice boost, and the constant shrinking of the transistor size just boggles the mind. But despite how impressive any new launch is, Intel always has something even more impressive in the pipeline, continuing the progression we’ve come to expect.

While 22nm is the current hotness for CPUs, Intel has both 7nm and 5nm in the planning stages, with the latter set to release in about ten years – barring any complications. How the company will accomplish such a small process is yet to be seen, but it can be expected that the challenges will be enormous. In shrinking down to even just 22nm, there have always been hurdles to overcome. Power leakage remains an important issue, as it can reduce stability and also efficiency.

In many ways, the fact that we even have 22nm-based processors is impressive, but picture that size shrinking down even further, to about 1/4th. To help put this all into perspective, the thickness of a strand of human hair is 60,000nm, so at 5nm, it would require 12,000 transistors set side-by-side to equal the thickness of just a single strand of hair. Impressive, isn’t it?

More impressive will be seeing these products actually being produced… if the obvious challenges will be overcome.