It's an architecture that dates back well over 40 years now, maybe it's time for a more modern architecture to take the reigns (or long past time, IMO). There's probably still performance gains to be eked out of it but they're only going to be incremental only now. Indeed they are, which is partially why they're in the mess they're in now (AMD beating them on performance/watt, utterly devastated by Apple's first attempt at a desktop/laptop CPU, losing their biggest single customer).Īnother reason may be that X86 might have just hit its limit. Though I'm not sure Intel's fabs are in the running - again in the short to medium term - aren't they a fair way behind the bleeding edge these days? But gate size has historical significance, so here we are.Īh, thanks - that's actually what I meant - I've edited my post to clarify. This would also have the advantage that density goes up, so bigger number is better. I wish they'd instead market their node 'size' as a transistor density (although even then the use of different standard cells for different chips would make it fuzzy). The manufacturers typically instead have 'logic cells,' which can be selected for maximum performance, density, or efficiency. The node name has, at various times, corresponded to various parts of the gate (minimum gate length, minimum metal pitch), but eventually they gave up on trying to define things to measure and just made it a marketing number.Īnyway, I believe most processors don't use minimally sized gates all that often - sizing gates is a whole big thing in VLSI. However, the rest of the transistor features have no relation to 3nm (or whatever measure) in size. I believe it relates to CMOS Transistor Gate size. "TSMC, the biggest contract semiconductor manufacturer on the planet, has admitted its node naming schemes aren’t actually related to what’s on the wafers, they’re “just numbers… like BMW 5-series or Mazda 6.”" It is a commercial or marketing term used by the chip fabrication industry to refer to a new, improved generation of silicon semiconductor chips in terms of increased transistor density, increased speed and reduced power consumption."įrom PCGames article that is footnote #3: "The term "5 nanometer" has no relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors. Is 5 nm the same idea? Or does it correspond to a feature size?įrom Wikipedia's entry on the 5 nm process: Hence why Intel gave up their naming scheme and aligned it to the equivalent TSMC node ("10nm Enhanced Super Fin" to "Intel 7"). The only thing it really signifies is that it's better than TSMC's "5nm". "3nm" is a marketing figure and not related to any actual feature sizes. That is approximately 25 silicon atoms across, according to some cursory googling.
0 kommentar(er)
