This microsculpture is pretty amazing… here’s a greatly enlarged sample:

So I understand Scoble being astounded that fewer people were interested in linking to his video documenting IBM’s breakthrough creating and sustaining 45 nanometer transistors. 45 nanometer technology is a huge step and continued evidence that Moore’s Law just will not die.

It’s hard to wrap one’s head around sizes this small. A nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter. One way to think about it: if you divided a human hair (widthwise) into 75,000 strands or so, one of those strands would be a nanometer. Or another way: a nanometer is to a meter as the diameter of a AAA battery is to the diameter of the earth.

And these chips, hundreds of which could fit on a red blood cell (30,000 on the head of a pin), can switch at a rate of 300 billion cycles per second! We live in amazing times.