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"Transistors use grooves etched in silicon to guide electrons around the chip. The channels do a similar job to that of wires, but on a much smaller scale. Making these grooves just 7nm wide means you can fit more transistors on the chips. For comparison a strand of human hair, at 100,000nm thick, is about 10,000 times wider than the channel. A red blood cell is a thousand times bigger, at 7,500nm in diameter. A strand of DNA is in the same order of magnitude, but slightly smaller at just 2.5nm wide."

"The turning point happened in 2005, when the transistors, while continuing to double in numbers, were neither faster nor more energy-efficient at the same rates as before."

"The gate, a chip component that switches transistors on and off, is a critical measure of transistor size. Previous research had already pushed gate lengths to one nanometer and below. By scaling gate lengths down to the size of single atoms, the latest work sets a new mark that'll be hard to beat. "In the future, it will be almost impossible for people to make a gate length smaller than 0.34 nm," the paper's senior author Tian-Ling Ren told IEEE Spectrum. "This could be the last node for Moore's Law.""

"Training a massive AI model, the size of GPT-4, would currently take about 8,000 H100 chips, and 15 megawatts of power, Nvidia said - enough to power about 30,000 typical British homes."