[joe_the_user]

> This press release is equivalent to "Scientists Cures Diabetes in Mice" - a breakthrough that happens about a half dozen times a year but has still yet to make it from the lab to the FDA.

Well, incremental lab improvements of this and that technique do make it into practice all the time. The failure of various biological researches is symptom of some fundamental brokenness or inherent hardness to biological research (biological systems are inherently messy - the ability of biologists to work with uniform, mass-produced mice is actually a hindrance when they try to apply those researches to non-uniform humans, etc). None of these apply to chip manufacture. The increase in quantum effects as one goes down in size may be a barrier to 7nm but it seems like it would a barrier to working one-off chips as well as to final production.

Which is to say, the skepticism doesn't seem to have a basis. A working chip is an important and necessary step to getting to mass production - clearly mass production would be their aim.

Your supposedly better link agrees: "While it should be stressed that commercial 7nm chips remain at least two years away, this test chip from IBM and its partners is extremely significant for three reasons: it's a working sub-10nm chip (this is pretty significant in itself); it's the first commercially viable sub-10nm FinFET logic chip that uses silicon-germanium as the channel material; and it appears to be the first commercially viable design produced with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography."