3 ms·
I 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, bu
by umvi 4y ago
I 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.