Wow they finally did it. Last I saw they were down to transistors about 10 atoms wide. Interesting they used a silver atom as the switch.

The transistor exclusively consists of metal, no semiconductors are used.

That's crazy.

“This quantum electronics element enables switching energies smaller than those of conventional silicon technologies by a factor of 10,000,”

If this is real that means that processors made this way could be 10k times faster... because getting rid of the heat is perhaps the main limiting factors in processor density and speed. If it's 10k times less energy, and 10 times less the size... then computers might take a huge leap forward.

However they still have to figure out how to put them on some sort of solid substrate and mass-produce them.

The lithography process to make modern processors pushes the limit of the focal distances of light, used to harden a resin that creates layers that create the billions of transistors in a single chip.

I'm not sure how they'll etch shapes as small as a single silver atom. I don't know how you precisely arrange a billion silver atoms. But hopefully someone will figure out a way soon, so we can all have super awesome computers.