Photos: Inside IBM's Zurich research lab

Another area under examination is "the I/O bottleneck". As Dr Christian Menolfi who specialises in I/O links explained, you can see the issue simply by looking at the back of an I/O processor.

"Pin counts are getting very large," Dr Menolfi said. "We are looking at needing 1,000 just for I/O. The complications of the I/O pins are growing faster than the number of pins. This is the package bottleneck."

The answer, according to Dr Menolfi, is advanced, multi-channel signalling (shown in the top-left display). By arranging the I/O channels in the optimum configuration the Zurich researchers hope to guarantee maximum data throughput.