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I hate that that's legal. Imagine if the food industry could get away with this in their marketing: "10g Fiber Bars" (fiber bars actually contain only 1g of f
by umvi 4y ago
I hate that that's legal.
Imagine if the food industry could get away with this in their marketing:
"10g Fiber Bars" (fiber bars actually contain only 1g of fiber, "10g fiber" just refers to the fact that it's the 10th generation of fiber bar they've created)
- jjoonathan 4y agoOh yeah? But my fiber bars are Asbestos Free! (thanks XKCD, I hate whoever figured this out too)
- mortenjorck 4y agoLike household products marketed as "not tested on animals" when all the compounds in the product were already tested on animals a century ago and the overhead for using any novel compounds would mean a vastly higher price (and probably animal testing).
- wahern 4y agoGypsum water is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Legs_Cooling_Water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Legs_Cooling_Water I've been given this as a treatment for a cold/flu. I drank it (didn't want to be rude) but couldn't stop thinking about how gypsum used to sometimes be contaminated with asbestos (due to coming from the same mines, I think, long ago).
- audunw 4y agoWhy do you care what the minimum gate length is of a process? Do you design standard cell libraries? Transistor density is the only thing you actually care about, and they've continued decreasing the numbers to roughly match what you'd expect from the "nm" number with old planar transistors. The comparison to a "10g fiber bar" doesn't work, because in the case of semiconductors the "10g fiber bar" is 10 times better than a "1g fiber bar" TSMC has sometimes started to use eg. N7 instead of 7nm.. but it really doesn't matter.
- umvi 4y agoI don't necessarily care what the minimum gate length is. But I don't like misleading marketing terms that ostensibly give you information about the product, but in reality don't give you any information at all. If marketing wants to use some metric to convey how good the product is, that's fine, but if the only information being conveyed is the product generation number, they should not be able to masquerade that generation number as a metric. Otherwise it misleads consumers into thinking, i.e. "2nm chips should be able to contain twice as many transistors as 4nm chips!" when that is false.
- adrian_b 4y agoActually "2 nm" chips are supposed to have 4 times more transistors than "4 nm" chips, because the area scales like the square of the length. Because each process generation was supposed to double the transistor density, the names of the processes have been given to correspond approximately with a geometric progression having the ratio sqrt(2): 500 nm, 350 nm, 250 nm, 180 nm, 130 nm, 90 nm, 65 nm, 45 nm, 32 nm, 22 nm, ... , but then the need to round to integer numbers combined with the desire to give distinct names to some process variants that have only small changes in the transistor density (e.g. "6 nm" vs. "7 nm") have lead to deviations from the original progression. While the transistor density has increased with each process generation, most recent generations have been content with a less than double density, e.g. with a density 1.8 times greater than in the previous generation.
- throw827474737 4y agoIf it doesn't matter why cant they just switch to a density number that translates better than a lookup table and doesn't refer to a measure it has no relationship with anymore?
- jjk166 4y agoWould you pay more money for the same product if they switched the nomenclature?
- 4y ago
- skybrian 4y agoI don't think any consumer products get advertised this way? "Now with 2-nm technology inside" is not something anyone cares about. It's not a meaningful benchmark for a chip. The companies that contract with chip foundries probably know what they're getting. It makes reading industry news a bit more confusing, but for most of us, we're reading it for entertainment, not any practical purpose.
- whiteboardr 4y agoFar less annoying and above all far less dangerous than allowing a car company to call their half-baked solution “Auto Pilot”.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 4y ago> "10g Fiber Bars" (fiber bars actually contain only 1g of fiber The supplement industry is good at this. You might see a protein bar with 30g of protein, and find out it's just amino spiking[1] People in the fitness industry were sending products into labs to have them analyzed and then exposing the companies on YouTube. [1]:The act of using low grade amino acids (usually L-Taurine and/or L-Glycine) to bump up the overall protein content
- Judson 4y agoSimilarly as a kid, I was surprised to learn "One-hour Photo" was a brand and didn't necessarily mean your photos would be ready in one hour...
- option 4y agoyou might be interested why sugar contents is never mentioned as % of daily norm on food packaging in US
- Symmetry 4y agoIt's less that they're marketing deceptively than that the measure they were using stopped making sense. If the ITRS back in the day had known we'd stop using planar transistors they could have named their nodes for the transistor density they achieved but they didn't and so we're stuck with a naming convention that no longer refers to a real physical quantity but we are still getting the density improvements per node that we traditionally have.
- zaptrem 4y agoWhy don't we just switch to that now?
- Symmetry 4y agoDecades of tradition. And it's not clear exactly what they would switch to, in general transistors double every node but different processes tend to have different design rules so different processes might give you different densities on different designs making the exact reference design a fraught question.