Loading...Over the years, our computers have become smaller, thinner, and faster, and continue to do so every year. From the massive hulking computers the size a whole room that was the cutting edge 30 years ago, we now have paper-thin smartphones and laptops capable of things not even imaginable on the supercomputers of only a few decades ago. iPhones made even a couple years ago still had more computing power than the computer used to send the first Apollo space mission to the moon, just to put our progress into scale. And we’re still trying to make those computers smaller and faster, but unfortunately, we’re coming close to the limit of how small and fast computer chips can be.
You see, a key part of a computer is a transistor, which are currently around 14 nanometers, or 500 times smaller than a red blood cell. As In A Nutshell explains in the great video, there’s not long left until we reach the limit of how small we can make these transistors: a few atoms wide. Luckily for us we have the possibility of quantum computing, which is explained very well in this video, along with how this technology could make what is already atoms wide even smaller and more efficient.