Just in the last one year, technology has shown us the world’s smallest phone with a 0.5-inch screen, smallest robot arm, smallest christmas card, smallest Mona Lisa using DNA, and world’s smallest 1TB pen drive.
It’s time now to glimpse upon the smallest PC ever built, thanks to the scientists at IBM. Hope you have your microscopes ready.
IBM
Correction, you aren’t looking at a single PC resting on the IBM scientist’s finger — the black plate has a cluster of dots, each dot represents a single PC. Mind boggled yet?
This new PC from IBM is so tiny that you need a microscope to look at them properly. Each PC is 1 mm by 1 mm in size, which is smaller than a grain of salt.
IBM unveiled the world’s smallest computer at its Think 2018 conference, which kicked off yesterday. According to IBM, this world’s tiniest computer costs under ten cents to manufacture — that’s less than Rs 7 per PC — and contains up to one million transistors each.
Don’t be quick to dismiss the real-world value of this grain-sized PC, because IBM claims it has the processing power of a 1990s PC. That by itself isn’t a hugely impressive claim — when you consider today’s smartphones are several times faster than yesteryear desktop PCs, but analysts claim this is good enough for a PC that resembles a speck of dust on a pile of salt.
What’s more, each dust-sized PC is blockchain-enabled and can be used for cryptocurrency purposes, and for other blockchain apps in the future.
IBM thinks these tiny PCs will be commonplace in everyday electronic objects within the next five years, in embedded devices — Internet of Things, shipment tracking, and more.
Bloomberg
Arvind Krishna, IBM’s head of research, claims that “these technologies pave the way for new solutions that tackle food safety, authenticity of manufactured components, genetically modified products, identification of counterfeit objects and provenance of luxury goods.”