IBM's new 5nm chip features 30 billion transistors

We're living in a world where our new graphics cards are made on the impressive 14nm and 16nm nodes, and we have companies like Qualcomm and Samsung making the latest and greatest SoCs on the small 10nm node - but IBM has trumped them all.

IBM has recently began testing their new 5nm process, with a huge 30 billion transistors - 30,000,000,000 transistors on something as small as your finger nail, just let that sink in. A couple of years ago the team hit 7nm and had 20 billion transistors which was impressive back then, but now we're at 5nm and 30 billion transistors. Amazing stuff.

The team at IBM hopes to see the impressive new 5nm chip helping their own cognitive computing efforts, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other "data intensive" tasks. The new chip could also help smartphones, with "two to three times" more battery life than we have now. We shouldn't expect that, but maybe a blend of improved battery life and speed - all balanced perfectly on 5nm. We shouldn't expect 7nm any time before 2018 at the earliest, so 5nm is still quite a while away.