Today Intel is introducing a new generation of processors to for the next generation of computers – and they’re tiny. At 45 nonometers wide (that’s 45 billionths of a meter), each chips packs 820 million transistors into an area the size of a postage stamp – a revolutionary breakthrough in size. By comparison, the first microprocessor Intel made in 1971, contained just 2,300 transistors. “Had we used the same transistors that we used in our chips 15 to 20 years ago, the chip would be about the size of a two-storey building," Bill Kircos of Intel told the BBC. Where previous chips used silicon dioxide, the new Penryn chips use hafnium, which has a greater ability to store electrical charges. The naming of the chip, for a town about 20 miles from Folsom, California, and follows an Intel convention of naming products after local geographic areas of towns. Intel’s reinvented transistors for its 45 nm chip were named among Time magazine’s Best Inventions of 2007.
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