Stefan Mileschin

Chipzilla is ready to embrace alternatives to the speed at all cost ethos which has made it so successful.

William Holt, who leads the company’s technology and manufacturing group, said this week that for chips to keep improving, Intel will soon have to start using fundamentally new technologies.

Holt pointed to two possible candidates – tunnelling transistors and spintronics. Both would require big changes in how chips are designed and manufactured, and would likely be used alongside silicon transistors.

What is important is that the technology will not offer speed benefits over silicon transistors and chips may stop getting faster. The new tech would improve the energy efficiency of chips, something important for many leading uses of computing today, such as cloud computing, mobile devices, and robotics.

“We’re going to see major transitions,” said Holt, speaking at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. “The new technology will be fundamentally different.”

Holt said that the status quo can only continue for two more generations, just four or five years, by which time silicon transistors will be only seven nanometres in size.

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