After years of struggling to make good on its chipmaking promises, Intel is publishing two papers at next week’s VLSI Symposium detailing a new way to build chip nodes that should make for more efficient processors, according to its press release today. It’s called PowerVia, and if Intel pulls this off, it’s a pretty big deal in the race to make smaller and smaller processor nodes.
PowerVia would be crucial for making the smaller, less power-hungry chips that are part of Intel’s road map debuted in 2021. It would move all power rails to the back of the chip, bringing power directly to the components that need it instead of routing it around the side and up into an “increasingly chaotic web,” to borrow Intel’s phrasing, of layered power...