Chips

Every year, billions of phones are discarded with their processors intact. Meanwhile, the AI sector spends billions on new chips at high environmental costs. Google is developing a way to bridge these two realities with a server made from old phones.

IBM has developed the blueprint for producing a processor using sub-1-nanometer chip technology, outdoing its own efforts to increase efficiency and processing power with 2-nm tech from a few years ago.

Nvidia’s RTX Spark looks less like a gaming-laptop chip and more like a premium Windows AI workhorse, pairing Arm, RTX graphics and unified memory for creators, local AI workflows and gaming on the side.

For the first time, a LiDAR sensor sees the world in color natively – no camera required. Ouster's Rev8 technology gives machines richer, faster 3D vision for the next wave of autonomous robots and vehicles.

Elon Musk has previously promised the fully autonomous Teslas and ultrafast Hyperloop transport – both of which are yet to materialize. For his next trick, he plans to build an enormous chip manufacturing plant to accelerate humanity's future.

They may be better known for stir-fries than supercomputing, but shiitake mushrooms have now been harnessed to function as living processors, storing and recalling data like a semiconductor chip but with almost no environmental footprint.

As AI systems grow bigger our data centers are feeling the heat with rising power demands. To tackle these growing energy needs, researchers have created a new chip that swaps electricity for light to handle one of AI's most power-hungry jobs.

We recently sat down with Adam Khan of Diamond Quanta – the company that wants to replace the silicon chip with ones made from diamond. We discussed the reason for this glittering idea, the challenges it presents, and the implications of the technology.

You may have seen this video doing the rounds; it peers through the lens of a microscope at a smartphone chip and starts zooming in, giving you a visceral sense of just how insanely tiny today's transistors have become.

Twas the night before Halloween, and Apple held a “spooky” event to announce some “scary fast” new products. The company unveiled its next generation chips, the M3 family, as well as the first iMacs and MacBooks that will feature them.

IBM Research’s lab in California is developing a prototype chip called NorthPole based on the architecture of the human brain. It holds the promise of greatly improving computer efficiency and producing systems that do not rely on cloud computing.

Last year, Monash University scientists created the "DishBrain" – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes.