IDF13: Intel Talks About Graphene Transistors – Promising Results But Don’t Expect Them Before 2020

A few weeks back, we shed some light on Graphene Transistors which are thought to be the end of Moore’s Law and would usher a new era of computing. Fudzilla has revealed that Intel talked about Graphene Transistors at IDF13: San Francisco and have an answer regarding whether we would see it in the upcoming generations or not.

Intel Talks About Graphene Transistors – Don’t Expect Them Before 2020

Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich and President Rene James were asking about Graphene Transistors in a Q/A session after the IDF13 press conference and they mentioned that Intel’s R&D team have done quiet some work in this field and have got some promising results and great progress but even at this pace, the Graphene Transistors are still a few generations from being fused inside a microprocessor.

This is what you will need for foldable computing and devices that you can bend and flex. Krzanich was very specific telling that Intel researchers are doing a lot of work on this field and that they saw some great progress. However it also said that product wise graphene is still a few generations away, that is what Krzanich said at the Q and A.

Graphene is still not cost effective solution, it’s good for prototype chips but not for full scale cost aware production. Until that time we have to stick to lithography and copper as the most price performance rated material. You won’t see any Atom or Core based flexible chips in this decade, at last this is how it looks from today’s point. Fudzilla

Intel have currently scheduled the launch of their 7nm Silicon based microarchitecture for 2017-2018 so we can expect that Graphene Transistors at best would arrive after 2020. Intel themselves mentioned 2019 in a best case scenario so you might get an idea that the technology still have alot of time since its arrival in the consumer scape.

So what are the new Graphene Transistors and how would they shape the next era in high-performance computing? Remember that old calculator lying around in your desk drawer somewhere? That is how our current generation will look compared to a Graphene Transistors based chip, and even then i am being generous. If a single graphene transistors is clocked at 427 Ghz then an entire processor could very well be in the Terahertz without breaking a sweat.

Think about it, if a single transistor is clocking at 427 Ghz, a chip wont contain more then a thousand transistors in the first generation. Considering that today’s generation has millions of transistors this will be a major deviation and violation of Moores Law which claims that transistors must double every 2 years. Not only will they not double but reduce by orders of magnitude while at the same tie phenomenally increasing computing power.