There’s a lot of excitement about Intel’s new chip, and some of it is well justified. It is a breakthrough. For some time, chip manufacturers have been at their ceiling of capabilities and you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Moore’s Law is finally reaching its zenith.

The arrival of 3-D chips means at last there is a whole new way of packing more transistors onto a single spec of silicon. And that means processors, the hearts and brains of computers, can perform more data transactions than their predecessors in a faster time.