4 ms·
Okay but who they are fooling exactly? It's not like an average soccer mum shops for CPUs and choses the 3nm because she is impressed with the 3 nanometre trans
by mrtksn 4y ago
Okay but who they are fooling exactly? It's not like an average soccer mum shops for CPUs and choses the 3nm because she is impressed with the 3 nanometre transistor gates, right?
Are they after investors or traders? Why they don't call it something like superlaser 9000 and the next year hyperlaser 10K speedmaster?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- colinmhayes 4y agoI think it's mainly for investors yea. They don't want people reading articles to see that the competitors numbers are better than theirs.
- potatolicious 4y ago> It's not like an average soccer mum shops for CPUs and choses the 3nm because she is impressed with the 3 nanometre transistor gates, right? No but enthusiasts (read: gamers) do. A lot of PC industry marketing nowadays is geared towards retail PC builders, who are very impressed by tech jargon.
- 7speter 4y agoBut tech media outlets like gamers nexus always remind viewers that intel 7 is really intels 10nm, etc
- ummonk 4y agoEven though the process sizes aren’t objective or comparable across manufacturers, they do indicate meaningful improvement in sizing / density from a specific manufacturer.
- NavinF 4y agoIt’s all about transistor density and newer nodes deliver that. Nobody cares about gate size.
- bergenty 4y agoWell how does transistor density go up without transistor sizes getting smaller?
- ezconnect 4y agoCompanies spend millions on brand marketing and that is the result. Needs to be short and memorable, your suggested naming is too long and more than 2 syllables.
- 0x0203 4y agoA large part of the current usage of the terminology comes from historical momentum. It used to be the case that transistor size was fairly well correlated with performance and capability. Moore's Law was well-known and a simple transistor size was a good, easy way to approximate performance potential for power consumption, speed, capability, complexity, etc... That single number started getting slapped on all of the marketing and documentation as a somewhat useful "overall performance rating" substitute. Companies got used to showing it off. Consumers came to expect it. The real, actual usefulness of the number diminished slowly enough that it's just continued so far. And marketing doesn't like removing stuff that they think makes their products look good. It's also still useful as an identifier to distinguish between one node process and another, so it's not entirely pointless, even if the nomenclature is meaningless.
- ChuckMcM 4y agoMy friends from marketing tell me that the target here are the press, specifically the industry press. In a competitive market you want to make it "hard" or "easy" to compare your product to your competitors product or service, if you're the leader you want it to be 'hard' and if you're the competitor you want it to be 'easy'. I originally asked this exact same question of the guy at AMD who started talking about their x86 chips in "equivalent" megahertz because they the actual clock rate was slower but they had a better instruction per clock (IPC) and so got more done per second than their Intel counterparts, but Intel was winning in the "Megahertz race" because that was what the press was fixated on using to describe the "leading" chips. Anyway, if you're a leader and and you can get the press talking about something your competitor isn't (or can't) do, then you "win" the perception of being ahead. In semiconductors, this has been very effective at getting the press to see Intel as "behind" because their "nanometer" number was stuck in the double digits while "more advanced" fabs were already in production on lower nanometer number processes. (Note the scare quotes are all just to indicate topics that both TSMC, Samsung, and Intel would have different takes on the current state of the art here).