this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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it doesnt mean what it traditionally mean since findett due yo the idea that finfett involves a folding process where its not necessarily a transistor in a traditional sense.
its the main reason what intel was conplaining about when it decided to rename its processes to be in lone with tsmc/samsung. Intel's 10nm process is actually a more dense pack of transitors than both TSMC's 7nm and Samsung's 8nm. so you have to make a stance, either TSMC/Samsung is over representing the definition, or Intel is underrepresenting it. because of it, either of the two actions need to happen:
TSMC/Samsung need to increase the number of their process because its illogical that a competitor has a more dense node with a higher number.
or
Intel renames their process with a lower number to better match its density when compared to TSMC/Samsung. Because Intel as a company only has the power to do this, this is what they did, and were underfire for it.
regardless, the nm stated in the nm does not represent what it used to traditionally mean, as whatever stance you have, some company is lying about their numbers.
No doubt there's lying and marketing spin going on, but these nm numbers aren’t just all fluff. They're kinda like how hard drive manufacturers market drives. They'll say its "2TB" or something but in reality it offers only 1.8TB of usable space. It’s similar with nm sizes; a 7nm from TSMC might stretch the truth a bit, but it's still somewhat grounded in real specs, not wildly off.
the hard drive one is more the concept of measuring things in base 10 or base 2, its caused by the rounding of 1000(10^3) vs 1024(2^10), hence where theres a difference between Gibibytes and Gigabytes.
finfetts decision was basically, its physically supposed to be one number, but folding it offers a performance increase (but not exactly equal to doubling transistors) so be picked an arbitrary lower number to represent ts peeformance. the problem is because its arbitrary, TSMC/Samsung gets all the power to fudge the numbers up.
if intels 10nm was more dense than TSMC 7, it shouldnt have been called TSMC 7, it should have been closer to TSMC 10 or 11.
12/16nm is when finfett technology was used, and the start of where the numbers started to get fudged.