Chip companies are finding ways around the physical problems that have held them back from making chips go faster.

On Feb. 14, IBM said it plans to combine microprocessor and memory chips onto a single piece of silicon to substantially improve processor performance.

Earlier this week, Intel announced that it had built a chip with 80 cores that is capable of completing 1 trillion computations every second.

Advanced Micro Devices announced on Feb. 12 that it has developed the means to individually throttle up and down the power demand on individual cores of a chip to reduce power consumption.