And Intel has developed a microprocessor called XScale, based on a technology it acquired by buying Digital Equipment's semiconductor division. Yet Intel cannot let go of the desktop entirely. About 80 percent of its revenue still comes from processors and other components for PCs. To illustrate this concept at this month's Consumer Electronics Show, Barrett placed a PC center stage, setting it on a giant blue ball. But IBM and Intel are racing ahead anyway, leapfrogging each other to announce startling breakthroughs, new materials, and transistors so tiny that there is no point of reference small enough to describe them.
Semiconductor chips consist of many transistors, or on-off switches.
There are upwards of 40 million of them in the Pentium 4 microprocessor, the brain of the newest personal computers. These switches are connected with wires. According to a pattern called Moore's Law, named for Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, transistors rapidly get smaller over time. Some have argued that Moore's Law could not hold much longer. In December, Intel announced a breakthrough that will allow it to make a transistor 0.03 micron thick, well below the current 0.18 standard.