News of a breakthrough in chip design or transistor layout must always be greeted with caution when so many have fallen by the wayside of technological history, or at any rate failed to deliver on the early promise. There are reasons for guarded optimism though, over the latest breakthrough from IBM and Samsung, involving a transistor architecture dubbed VTFET (vertical-transport nanosheet field effect transistor). This may help keep Moore’s Law in effect for a while longer without resorting to radically different approaches such as quantum computing, but the greater promise is in improving battery life for power-constrained mobile devices, and by the same token reducing carbon footprint for distributed systems around the network edge. All approaches to chip design and…