6 ms·

Gigahertz are still the number of cycles. That didn't inflate, it correlates to a real timing. TSMC call it N3 instead of 3nm for a reason. It's not 3nm.

zerocrates 4y ago
Gigahertz weren't inflated per se, but there were similar effects to the name games with process nodes with clockspeeds when those were more directly seen as indicators of performance. I'm thinking particularly of AMD having Athlon model numbers that were 1:1 to clockspeeds for years, then Athlon XP switching to ones that were above their actual speeds, to sort of vaguely indicate which Intel clockspeed they were claiming performance parity with. Of course once they were beyond the clockspeed-above-all Pentium 4, Intel themselves stopped focusing on marketing clockspeeds and things gave way to basically arbitrary naming/numbering schemes. (Or to some extent, core counts.)
- 0x457 4y ago
  Well, performance is roughly = clock speed * instructions per cycle. When intel was dominant (pre-Anthlon XP and pre-Core era), Clock speed alone could have been used to measure performance. Then, AMD Athlon XP come out with higher IPC than Pentiums, but the customers were used "Higher clock, higher performance" even though Athlon XP was faster at the same clock speed. So, they've changed model names to indicate performance parity, that was the game intel played. They didn't lie or mislead about clock speeds anywhere.
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    That's my point: this seems to me more less exactly where we are now with "Intel 7" being their "10 nm but better-er" process and the previously-known-as-7nm becoming "Intel 4." They're saying, well, the actual nanometer number has long been a little wishy-washy anyway, so we're jettisoning the pretense that this is a measurement of anything in particular and just picking a number that sounds better and aligns with our competition's numbers. And of course it's not just Intel marketing this way, everyone does, but their more recent naming change makes it more transparent. Tired of years of saying "welll, TSMC's Xnm (or X number with no units that's sort of implied to be nm) is really equivalent to our X+Ynm," they just go for marketing on parity. Like I said in the start of my previous post, this isn't actually inflating (or deflating as the case may be) but it's just taking a concept that's widespread among the consumers as a proxy for quality/value and marketing to that idea rather than any actual physical characteristic.
alexnewman 4y ago
I used to work at intel. I remember when people complained how our hz weren't as fast as the apple hz at the time. So i remember people complaining about how a 2ghz chip was the same speed as 800Mhz apple. So in some sense it's slightly different than nanometers, it still was a marketing thing. So yes hz are real. yes clocks are real. The relevance of the hz was what was in question. However with nanometers, it is kindof the opposite. The nm thing is an advertisement thing but it is relevant to performance.

zerocrates 4y ago

Gigahertz weren't inflated per se, but there were similar effects to the name games with process nodes with clockspeeds when those were more directly seen as indicators of performance. I'm thinking particularly of AMD having Athlon model numbers that were 1:1 to clockspeeds for years, then Athlon XP switching to ones that were above their actual speeds, to sort of vaguely indicate which Intel clockspeed they were claiming performance parity with. Of course once they were beyond the clockspeed-above-all Pentium 4, Intel themselves stopped focusing on marketing clockspeeds and things gave way to basically arbitrary naming/numbering schemes. (Or to some extent, core counts.)

0x457 4y ago
Well, performance is roughly = clock speed * instructions per cycle. When intel was dominant (pre-Anthlon XP and pre-Core era), Clock speed alone could have been used to measure performance. Then, AMD Athlon XP come out with higher IPC than Pentiums, but the customers were used "Higher clock, higher performance" even though Athlon XP was faster at the same clock speed. So, they've changed model names to indicate performance parity, that was the game intel played. They didn't lie or mislead about clock speeds anywhere.
- zerocrates 4y ago
  That's my point: this seems to me more less exactly where we are now with "Intel 7" being their "10 nm but better-er" process and the previously-known-as-7nm becoming "Intel 4." They're saying, well, the actual nanometer number has long been a little wishy-washy anyway, so we're jettisoning the pretense that this is a measurement of anything in particular and just picking a number that sounds better and aligns with our competition's numbers. And of course it's not just Intel marketing this way, everyone does, but their more recent naming change makes it more transparent. Tired of years of saying "welll, TSMC's Xnm (or X number with no units that's sort of implied to be nm) is really equivalent to our X+Ynm," they just go for marketing on parity. Like I said in the start of my previous post, this isn't actually inflating (or deflating as the case may be) but it's just taking a concept that's widespread among the consumers as a proxy for quality/value and marketing to that idea rather than any actual physical characteristic.

alexnewman 4y ago

I used to work at intel. I remember when people complained how our hz weren't as fast as the apple hz at the time. So i remember people complaining about how a 2ghz chip was the same speed as 800Mhz apple. So in some sense it's slightly different than nanometers, it still was a marketing thing. So yes hz are real. yes clocks are real. The relevance of the hz was what was in question. However with nanometers, it is kindof the opposite. The nm thing is an advertisement thing but it is relevant to performance.