It’s ok to say ‘picometer’
Sub-1000 pm, then.
The “Xnm” sizes have not related to any actual length for decades. It is purely marketing.
lol, no kidding.
Do you have any more information on this? I’d like to know how the hell this happened.
It started out as gate-length and then when we started building 3D transistors with FinFETs and gate-all-around, where the 2-dimensional gate-length is not comparable to “flat” transistors, they had to instead estimate the effective equivalent 2D gate-length that would give the same transistor density.
So the process name is now no longer a measure of any tangible feature size but more a descriptor of transistor density that is loosely consistent with the prior convention.
appreciate the explanation good to see that it isn’t actually purely marketing, in my opinion, and they try to keep the old meaning coherent with these more advanced generations
yes, I see now why you just said, “marketing”
lol
still, quite interesting
I wasn’t the original commenter but I suppose you could call it marketing, sure.
It seems like 1994 was where process nodes started to not be so correlated with their actual size, according to this IEEE article. In 1994, transistor features were actually smaller than what was advertised, up until the early 2000’s, where the naming became smaller than physical size. From what I understand, most of the gains in computing power have come from other improvements in processes and transistor geometry.
I guess the industry never really bothered changing their naming schemes, or couldn’t figure out a better way?
They actually decided to use Angstroms for the initial sub-nanometre processes.
FTA:
Whatever, Chosun Biz also claims that TSMC plans to begin mass production of the node following N2 in 2028. Known as A14 in TSMC parlance, where the “A” stands for angstroms, the next unit of measurement down from nanometers, a 2028 release would put it exactly two years behind N2 and thus maintain a biennial cadence of rolling out a new node every two years.
And Intel talked about it in 2021:
well, there ya go
Angstrom is not the next unit down from nanometers.
Picometers are the next unit down. Angstrom is a non SI antiquated measure.
Yeah, it’s pcgamer writing about silicon manufacturing. Even the headline is insane (“1nm chips” instead of “1nm process”).
What’s the point? Its just stupid numbers. GPU’s will get more and more expensive to justify these tech “advances”.
We have known how to make these GPU’s, the problem isn’t how to make them smaller and smaller but how do we make more of them.
Gamers can’t buy it to play, 3d artists can’t buy it for rendering, even AI enthusiasts can’t buy it to run local models. These news just feel like these people are living in their own bubble.
Technology advancements like this are going to keep on marching along no matter the price of the end good. There is massive demand for better and better silicone and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change pretty much ever, at least not in our lifetimes.
Also, every time you see these companies announcing new chips with smaller transistors, that means they built an entire new fab to produce these chips. The old fabs generally still stay operating if there is demand, so this does in fact increase capacity overall
There are limits tho, there’s a general trend of diminishing returns. Moore’s law is no longer applicable.
My point is that we want more innovation is production capacity, these new innovations are mostly for making money. What the company wants is to say “look at our new shiny thing its 10% better than previous gen but it will cost you 50% more than last gen, also last gen is deprecated”.
All of this is motivated by the drive to make more money for the producers, not to help the enduser.
Increasing the transistors count means datacenters can use less gpus to do the same amount of work.
Don’t these new GPU’s need to be bought by the datacenters? Where do you think they will push to cost to? Can one 5090 do more than 2x 3090? It sure as hell going to cost twice as much.
You have to think how much faster this new chip is, and whether it is fast enough to justify the cost. Gone are the days of moore’s law when transistors could double every 2 years.
We need more production capacity to bring down cost, not a slightly faster gpu
Smaller transistors means more processors per silicon wafer… litterally increasing production and driving cost down.
This is very small.
You could fit about 7x1016 1nm chips on one 30cm wafer.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
Source?
Walter Reed uses picometers to measure the POTUS’ dick.
Yes, but unlike the president’s dick, I expect these transistors to do something productive.
:P
I dunno, I don’t see any nanometers on there…
The flaws are immeasurable?
Yet big news!
