IBM has announced an exciting breakthrough in transistor technology: the world's first 2nm chip. The news comes directly from IBM's semiconductor research facility in Albany, New York, and has big implications for IBM's partners, such as Samsung, or at least IBM's newest partner: IBM's partner Samsung and especially its new partner It has big implications for Intel.

Indeed, it may prove invaluable in Intel's race to catch up with rival TSMC.

With 50 billion transistors on a chip "the size of a fingernail," IBM claims that the "smallest component" of this research chip is smaller than a strand of DNA. This appears to give the company an edge over its previous 5nm chips in terms of size, with a 45% performance improvement and 75% reduction in energy consumption predicted compared to 7nm chips (via Tom's Hardware).

IBM's $3 billion "Seven Nanometers and Beyond" research program seeks to move away from the old FinFET design era. These new nanosheet designs are part of a gated all-around design, meaning that the current leakage of FinFETs will no longer need to be addressed. [Not much has been revealed about chip materials or transistor density, nor has the company revealed its plans to work around the inherent limitations of such small chips in terms of interconnect scaling (how to connect all chips on the fly).

What we do know is that thanks to IBM's recent partnership with Intel, the path to Intel becoming comparable to TSMC's ever smaller nodes is becoming increasingly clear. These nodes will serve as building blocks for AMD's CPUs and GPUs, including, among other things, CPUs that are currently ideal for gaming.

Good timing, too: IBM expects this 2nm nanosheet process to start trickling out from partner foundries in 2024, albeit later that year. Perhaps in time to compete head-to-head with TSMC's 2nm chips.