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Your standard disclaimer about nm when referring to modern chips: > Most recently, due to various marketing and discrepancies among foundries, the number itsel
by nickcw 7y ago
Your standard disclaimer about nm when referring to modern chips:
> Most recently, due to various marketing and discrepancies among foundries, the number itself has lost the exact meaning it once held. Recent technology nodes such as 22 nm, 16 nm, 14 nm, and 10 nm refer purely to a specific generation of chips made in a particular technology. It does not correspond to any gate length or half pitch. Nevertheless, the name convention has stuck and it's what the leading foundries call their nodes. Since around 2017 node names have been entirely overtaken by marketing with some leading-edge foundries using node names ambiguously to represent slightly modified processes. Additionally, the size, density, and performance of the transistors among foundries no longer matches between foundries. For example, Intel's 10 nm is comparable to foundries 7 nm while Intel's 7 nm is comparable to foundries 5 nm.
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node
So 7nm does not mean the chip has 7nm features, it means that the marketing team called it "7nm".
- agumonkey 7y agonm is the new Hz
- ChuckNorris89 7y agoNot really. Everyone can check the frequency of the CPU so the one on the box mostly matches the one you'll get but no consumer can put the silicone under the electron microscope and measure all the transistor features and feel cheated that it doesn't match the advertised size. Outside techies, most consumers don't know wtf nm is and how that correlates with performance, maybe some might even think that more nm is better, but on the other hand, most have a vague idea that more MHz is better. That's one of the reasons why consumer grade tech has its specs totally different emphasized than the professional stuff. If you look at the ryzen box you won't find many specs but you'll find a VR logo. :)
- jagged-chisel 7y agoFor marketing purposes, nm is the new Hz. Once, clock speed 'mattered' and was used in marketing to indicate a CPU that did work faster. There was a period of time where Hz was still used by marketing, yet it had stop reflecting how much work the CPU actually performed in a given amount of time. The public caught on that Hz mattered less. Now, they're hoping nm matters in marketing (no as 'this is a faster chip' but 'this chip uses 'better' technology than TheOtherGuys/ThePreviousGeneration/WhatEver) for at least a few moments before the marketing team has to come up with some other differentiator.
- agumonkey 7y agoremember the p-rating ?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- XCSme 7y agoAs in TVs panel refresh rate?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sgift 7y agoAs in "new CPU with 4 GHz, far better than the old 3 GHz CPUs"
- lmilcin 7y agoTo complete disclaimer: "Do not compare CPUs by process technology or frequency. If you need to compare, use benchmarks that show performance and efficiency and even better, do it on your own application because the results vary between applications."
- vbezhenar 7y agoHow do I compare CPUs on my own application without buying them? Is there some kind of daily-billed cloud computing service where I can choose any CPU and run my app on it?
- lmilcin 7y agoJust use benchmarks that are published online that compare existing application on various hardware. Process node is basically meaningless for the user.
- NullPrefix 7y agoPreviously published benchmarks may or may not have the current spectre/meltdown patch applied.
- spease 7y agoLaptops also frequently have significant performance variations, even with the same chip, due to differing cooling solutions.
- derefr 7y agoThis closely matches what happened to processor naming. It used to be that any two (CISC) CPUs with the same frequency were about on par with one-another, so we just called processors by their frequency. As soon as processors started adding things like SSE, though, that went out the window, since now “one cycle” could do arbitrary amounts of work, and also consume arbitrary amounts of electricity. So now we instead group processors by their manufacturer and model, and compare processors by “generation”, which ends up being a loose count of each time each vendor has done a large redesign that enabled efficiency increases beyond “just” a process-node shrink. So: is there any analogous new convention for naming process nodes, now that you can’t just refer to them by their size? If there’s a dropdown select box on some form internal to e.g. Apple, where an engineer specifies what process-node of what fab they’d like to use to print a new chip—and said list has had some thought put into making it intuitively unambiguous—then what would the items in that list look like?
- neodymiumphish 7y agoYep, but now we refer to chips by their cost, instead. AMD Threadripper 3990X : $3990
- warrenm 7y agoThat's only true when it's first released
- Klinky 7y agoThat was never the case. Go back even to 386 days and AMD or Cyrix were not always on par with Intel clock for clock. This only really flipped when Athlon came out. You also had to think about DX vs SX, if you got L2 cache, 5x86 is really a 486, what is an Overdrive chip?, why does a PR166 CPU run at 100MHz, what is a Celeron, and why is 300A model so much faster than the original 300? Etc etc etc
- mtgx 7y agoThat goes the same for Intel's "10nm", too. Also, I assume the point of such commentary is really to emphasize that "Intel isn't really that far behind." But it still is quite behind, considering TSMC's is on its second-generation "7nm"/10nm-equivalent, and Intel is basically still in "test-mode" with its 10nm process, and is nowhere near mass production with it.
- Bartweiss 7y agoThanks for this. Do you happen to know which, if any, of the announced 7nm chips/processes are actually small enough to involve the problems of 7nm gates? Obviously the names don't carry much weight, and speed can be checked directly instead of inferred from size, but I'm still curious about the actual state of the production issues.