Comment on TSMC to make advanced 3nm chips in Japan

craigers@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Close, except it’s not a marketing term. It’s part of a published IEEE standard.

  From Wikipedia:

  The term “3 nanometer” has no direct relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch, or gate pitch) of the transistors. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a 3 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 48 nanometers, and a tightest metal pitch of 24 nanometers.[12]

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  • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    So, the IEEE has an actual norm for marketing speak.
    Which, honestly, ought to happen more often.

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  • craigers@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    And the number keeps going down because… That’s good marketing. IEEE rebranded 802.11ax as wifi 6 because… Marketing. They can do it too.

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    • Taldan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      IEEE rebranded 802.11ax as wifi 6 because… Marketing

      Minor correction: The standard is IEEE, but it was developed by the WiFi Alliance (who make their money by certifying devices as meeting the WiFi 6 standard). It’s a pretty fair marketing strategy though. Normal users aren’t going to notice 802.11ac vs 802.11ax

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      • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Especially since there are tons of specs that arent direct wifi upgrades in that same convention. I.e. 802.11ah for long range or ap for WiGig 802.11ad or confused with 802.1ax the Ethernet link aggregation standard.

        Imagine trying to explain that in the store to the person that calls the wireless access point “the Internet”.

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  • zaphod@sopuli.xyz ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    If I’m not entirely mistaken there is still some basis to the nanometre number, it just doesn’t refer to the actual smallest feature size or gate pitch anymore. Basically in the mid-2000 Dennard scaling stopped working and ever since the nanometre numbers are “made up”. Dennard scaling was how most progress was made by just shrinking transistors. But that doesn’t mean just because Dennard scaling doesn’t work anymore there is no progress, it’s just harder to achieve. So the semiconductor manufacturers just continued naming their fabrication methods as if Dennard scaling still worked.

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    • Lemming6969@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      They should count up by some benchmark. If x/mm^2 doesn’t capture the improvement anymore, and they aren’t shrinking things much anymore, benchmark some common output.

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      • zaphod@sopuli.xyz ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        It’s not necessarily about transistors/mm^2, there is also power consumption and clock frequency. Back in the mid-2000’s clock frequencies stopped just under 4GHz and then went down for a few years before going back up to way past 4GHz in the last ten years or so.

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    • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Its at least somewhat based on the transistor density increase they get from other techniques right? Like “3 nm” is the equivalent transistor size they’d need to get the same transistor density using 2005 chip design.

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