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Gentle reminder that 3nm is a meaningless marketing number that does not represent neither the transistor size no element density, and it does not correlate in
by wetpaws 6y ago
Gentle reminder that 3nm is a meaningless marketing number that does not represent neither the transistor size no element density, and it does not correlate in any way with all other Xnm production of other companies.
- doctoboggan 6y agoSo what does it mean then?
- zionic 6y agoLiterally nothing more than a marketing "group name" for a family of processes, none of which have any dimension approaching 3nm.
- Koshkin 6y agoAccording to Wikipedia [1], it refers to "the process' minimum feature size." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication#Size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabricati...
- wetpaws 6y agoIn many cases, like in Samsung case, it does not even refer to the feature size, and just represents a generation of the tech process or some arbitrary incremental improvements.
- agumonkey 6y agoProbably the size the lightwave smallest etch on a die. Now an etch doesn't make a transistor which means the smallest useful etch is larger.
- pkaye 6y agoThis talks a little about how the meaning has changed over time: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node
- phkahler 6y ago>> ... it does not correlate in any way with all other Xnm production of other companies. True. But it should be significantly better/smaller than TSMC 5nm which is claimed to be 1.85x density over TSMC 7nm, which they are using now to make a chip with 59 Billion transistors. The only other players to compare to are Intel and Samsung.
- KaoruAoiShiho 6y agoIt does correlate... generally the numbers respect actual end performance in respect to one another, nobody's having a smaller name that's actually worse than the bigger name of a different company.