The first computer chip made with thousands of carbon nanotubes, not silicon, marks a computing milestone. Carbon nanotube chips may ultimately give rise to a new generation of faster, more energy-efficient electronics.

  1. No, possibly never 2. No and

  2. It doesn’t make sense to talk about TDP when the technology is so vastly different. Because CNTs are so much more energy efficient (and they dissipate heat much faster) this will enable entirely novel chip/computer architectures.

For example, because of how much heat is dissipated by silicon, multilayer chip designs are largely impractical or not efficient. With CNTFETs, we should be able to build multilayer chips with memory layers sandwiched in between compute layers. A system like that would have several orders of magnitude faster and lower latency memory. Even if we end up needing to clock it slower, the whole system may end much faster anyway due to the vastly superior memory access.

That is just one example of things possible.

/r/science Thread Parent Link - sciencenews.org