Smartphones! tablets! mobile computing!  4G networks! All cool toys to play with.

We can thank the innovative brains behind incredibly powerful microprocessors for making these things available to us.

Now a promising new jump in that technology is on its way… meaning more fun stuff for us in the future.

MIcrochip giant Intel recently announced its plans to expand development of three-dimensional microprocessors.  Current microchips are built on flat panels, which limits the number of transistors that can be included on a single chip – in turn limiting the processing speed of the chip.

The new 3-D design, called “Tri-Gate”, builds microchips around cylindrical bases, which allows them to almost double the number of transistors, increase processing speed, and waste less energy than the current predominant microchip design.

These chips are just 22 nanometers in width – that’s just 10 times the length of a DNA strand! To get a better idea of what exactly the change is, take a look at this article.

So when the next PC released claims to be faster, better and stronger than the last, maybe you’ll know just a little bit about how it got that way.