But perhaps the biggest advance showed Saturday was a research paper demonstrating a way to stack transistors - tiny switches that form the most basic building blocks of chips by representing the 1s and 0s of digital logic - on top of one another.
Intel believes the technology will yield a 30 per cent to 50 per cent increase in the number of transistors it can pack into a given area on a chip. Raising the number of transistors is the main reason chips have consistently gotten faster over the past 50 years.
"By stacking the devices directly on top of each other, we're clearly saving area," Paul Fischer, director and senior principal engineer of Intel's Components Research Group told Reuters in an interview. "We're reducing interconnect lengths and really saving energy, making this not only more cost-efficient, but also better performing."
