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IBM has built a working computer processor with 50 billion transistors in an area the size of a fingernail, making it the smallest and densest computer chip architecture yet produced. If it is adopted for use in data centres and consumer electronics, it could slash the vast amount of energy required for computing.

The computer chip manufacturing industry names generations of chip technology by size class, though these don’t refer to the actual size of the chip. New commercial devices tend to use 7-nanometre or 5-nanometre chips. For instance, Apple’s M1 chip in…