I was reading online that CPU cores can be less than a square millimetre per core. I’m wondering if we are going to reach a limit with how small we can compress them.
In: Engineering
We already have reached (in lab experiments) the limit for how small a transistor can be before quantum mechanics take over and electrons are as likely to pass through an off transistor as an on.
With transistors that size, the lower limit to the size of a CPU core depends entirely on how many transistors you want in it.
The upper limit to the size of a CPU core is generally set by how far an electric signal can travel in a single clock cycle. For a 3ghz processor this is about 6cm.
Edit to add: the limit of the size of a transistor is the size of a medium sized molecule, so the limit for how small a CPU core can get is probably around the size of a virus as long as you don’t need it to do anything but basic arithmetic.
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