this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59672 readers
3002 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes, but that is long past an actuall transistor size and just a marketing term.
So what is the actual transistor size then? And why use an SI unit then anyway? Why not use femto-bananas then when it does not reflect the real size?
Angstrom was invented in physics because they needed a length unit that was smaller than SI prefixes would allow. The industry only picked it up once they got to a certain level.
(Contrary to what a lot of people think, physicists do not strictly follow SI. They bypass it for reasons of convenience all the time.)
It's kind of like needing the proper units for the scale you need to work at.
Smallest features are around 13nm due to EUV wavelength. I think people incorporated hacks to etch smaller stuff but not much smaller.
I think it is similar stuff as with Moore's "law" that is not an actuall law only a trend or myth.
In the 70' 80' 90' that number represented an actuall size and it stuck into 00' 10' and 20'
There's also an argument out there that companies should stop talking about feature sizes (that are fudged for marketing all the time, anyway) and instead talk about density of components.
Also, if you think Moore's Law is about density of components, then the industry has kept up. However, that's not actually what Moore claimed way back when: https://wumpus-cave.net/post/2024/03/2024-03-20-moores-law-is-dead/index.html
The standard size of transistors is 7nm these days. IBM is already moving to 5nm and testing with 2nm.
Apples M1 has 5nm for example.
There's researchers that created 1nm chips.
This does put us only slightly behind Moores law.
Those are all marketing names not real dimensions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/14_nm_process
God, it's like women's clothing sizes all over again.