A team of Scottish, German, and Italian researchers have collaborated to subvert the limits of the silicon chip and have come up with a way to create nano-sized wires and intricate nano-chips that can turn handheld phones into an equal of high-end computer laptops. This new discovery will be published in the next issue of the scientific journal Science.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), and the University of Rome (Italy) have speculated that their new findings will pave the way to more powerful computers just about the size of your palm. "This will help to make small devices much more powerful in the future," said Dr. Michael Zaiser of the University of Edinburgh.

While many an enthusiast rambles on how great AMD processors are better than Intel or vice versa, soon there would be little to fuel the bickering when handheld supercomputers have come to be realized. "Holding a supercomputer in the palm of your hand will one day be possible - and we are going to make sure all the wires are in the right place," Zaiser said. That is, of course, once engineers and scientists have overcome the issues that come hand in hand with nano-miniaturization.

"What we found is when we made these wires smaller and smaller they started to behave in a very funny way," said Zaiser. The different behavior cued the researchers to use computers to predict these unconventional behaviors, which could help engineers understand the new phenomena and how to work around them.

In the experimental front, STI (Sony, Toshiba, IBM) have previously voiced out plans for a 45-nm iteration of the 1x8 core CELL Broadband Engine, while Intel is still secretive about developments on its 80-core prototype (codenamed POLARIS) which still has a couple of years before entering commercial production. AMD in the meantime has previously released news of its new Phenom processor, a multi-core on single-die architectural marvel.