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Why 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 abou
by audunw 4y ago
Why 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?
- throw827474737 4y agoNo, but why? Anyway I'd be happier if we stop abusing a measure for nomenclature..
- jjk166 4y agoIf you're not willing to pay more, it means you don't actually see the change as providing any value.
- phpisthebest 4y agoBecause words have meaning, and when a measure /indicator of performance ceases to be a good one we do not simply change the definition of the words we used to us, instead we come up with something new i.e when Ghz stopped being a useful metric (or sole metric) for CPU we switched to other measurements, we did not redefine what Ghz represented.
- einr 4y agoi.e when Ghz stopped being a useful metric (or sole metric) for CPU we switched to other measurements, we did not redefine what Ghz represented. They really did try to muddy the waters back when CPU clock was the only commonplace metric of CPU speed the general consumer would know about though -- as a couple examples, there was the AMD K5 PR200 which was a 133 MHz part but supposedly (according to the AMD marketing team, at least) competitive with a Pentium 200 MHz -- or the AMD Athlon XP 1700+, which does not run at 1.7 GHz as you might think but only about 1.4. They did stop short of outright calling it GHz, you're right, but clearly the intent was for the consumer to think that a Pentium 4 1700 MHz and an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ were comparable.