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Comment by celeritascelery | Hacker News Reader

More people need to understand this. The “<x>nm” nomenclature now represnts the new generation of product. Similar to how 4G cellular is not 33% better then 3G. It just means the next generation.

One of the things that got Intel in trouble with their 10nm generation of products was that their 10nm process was much more ambitious then other companies. Turned out that it increased the complexity (and decreased the yield) so much that they were not able to make it work when they expected to.

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There are also process generations within the same process "size". Intel has 14mm, 14nm+, 14nm++, and now 10nm (the limited # of 10nm skus released so far is because of all the 10nm problems) and 10nm+. I thought I read somewhere that while 10nm+ was originally intended for Ice Lake and beyond, they're considering moving some 10nm products to 10nm+ early because the original 10nm process yields are so awful.

The 3g/4g analogy works here too. LTE has categories (0 to 19, with some extras) that increase bandwidth (or another metric) from Rel8 to Rel13.

Please could we not use this 3G / 4G analogy?

1. 4G, or LTE really is at least 33% better than 3G even when it initially launch. Just the latency reduction were huge improvement.

2 The different between baseline 4G and top end 4G is an completely different scale to nomenclature.

I'm sorry, I don't understand why it isn't a good analogy.

The comment is saying that nanometers really only denote the technology generation, and that is exactly what 3G and 4G denote.

There is wide variation between 4G phones, as there is wide variation in 10nm processes. The analogy seems ideal.

I think the point was that 3G -> 4G does not imply a literal 33% increase in performance, which one could guess was the case as 4 is a 33% increase over 3 (3x1.33333~=4)

I always thought it just meant "fourth generation". Never until now did I think 4G would be a 33% increase over 3G

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