But several such advances have occurred recently and, together, they could drive radical performance gains. The IBM plan is more fundamental and could bump up performance. Until now, chip manufacturers have used aluminum, which is a better conductor per pound but not better for a given cross-section.
Electrons travel faster through copper than aluminum, so less copper is needed for circuits.
Also, components can nestle closer together. Harder drives Copper chips run cooler, use less power and might cost less. IBM will begin producing the copper chips next spring and doesn't intend to license the technology to other makers. The Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory has come up with a way to harden hard drives. One bottleneck to packing more data onto hard drives has been the magnetic read-write head's distance from the disk surface.