How is it possible to have 1.4nm transistors?
Transistor density in millions of transistors per square millimeter is more relevant. For example: Intel 10nm is 101 MTr/mm², TSMC 7nm Mobile is 97 MTr/mm² so they are very similar.
* TSMC’s 5nm EUV is 171.3 MTr/mm²
Source: https://www.techcenturion.com/7nm-10nm-14nm-fabrication
I also would like to find any historical data on MTr/mm² just to see if there high correlation with nm names.
When comparing across generations, you'll get the most accurate picture if you stick with the same kind of chip (eg. desktop-class GPUs) and same vendor so that they're more likely to count transistors the same way from one year to the next.
Transistor count plateaued. Moore's law died.
To avoid upseting and confusing consumers with this new reality, chip makers agreed to stop delineating their chips by the size of their components, and to instead group them in to generations by the time that they where made.
Helpfully, in another move to avoid confusion, the chip makers devised a new naming convention, where each new generation uses "nm" naming as if Moore's law continued. Say for example in 2004 you had chips with a 34nm NAND, and your next gen chips in 2006 are 32nm, then all you do is calculate what the smallest nm would have been if chip density doubled, and you use that size for marketing this generation. So you advertise 17nm instead of 32nm.
Using this new naming scheme also makes it super easy to get to 1.4nm and beyond. In fact, because it's decoupled from anything physical, you can even get to sub-plank scale, which would be impossible on the old scheme.
Edit: Some comments mention that transistor count and performance are still increasing. While that is technically true, I did the sums, the Intel P4 3.4Ghz came out 2004, if Moore's law continued, we would have 3482Ghz or 3.48 TERAHERTZ by now.
That must mean, that this marketing works to some degree. Therefore, it cannot be common knowledge amongst everyone who buys PC parts. Or it might be somewhat known but still affecting their shopping choices. If it was truly common knowledge, there would be no incentive to keep naming them this way?
There is much, much worse marketing out there to tackle first.
This isn't marketing fraud because you aren't being sold transisters like you buy lumber at Home Depot.
Instead, you buy working chips with certain properties whose process has a name "10 nm" or "7 nm". Intel et. al. have rationalizations for why certain process nodes are named in certain ways; that's enough.
Funny you say that, because "two by fours" used to be 2" x 4”, but became progressively thinner as manufacturing processes improved.
That said I'm not sure why they don't sell it by it's actual size.
"Recent technology nodes such as 22 nm, 16 nm, 14 nm, and 10 nm refer purely to a specific generation of chips made in a particular technology. It does not correspond to any gate length or half pitch. Nevertheless, the name convention has stuck and it's what the leading foundries call their nodes"
..."At the 45 nm process, Intel reached a gate length of 25 nm on a traditional planar transistor. At that node the gate length scaling effectively stalled; any further scaling to the gate length would produce less desirable results. Following the 32 nm process node, while other aspects of the transistor shrunk, the gate length was actually increased"
"With the introduction of FinFET by Intel in their 22 nm process, the transistor density continued to increase all while the gate length remained more or less a constant."
I'll repeat it for you see you seem to keep missing it: transistor density continued to increase
> Transistor count plateaued.
No. Transistor count has continued to increase. The "nm" numbers still correlate with overall transistor density. The change is that transistor density is no longer a function purely of the narrowest line width that the lithography can produce. Transistors have been changing shape and aren't just optical shrinks of the previous node.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling
[2] Though Dennard's paper came out in 1974 and the term "Moore's Law" was coined in 1975 so they've always been a bit confused.
"Anyone seen the new V12s this year?"
1) Transistor density has continued to increase. The original naming convention was created when we just used planar transistors. That is not the case anymore. More modern processes create tertiary structures of "nodes" which condense the footprint of packs of transistors. Moore's law didn't die. It just slowed.
2) Clock speed is not correlated to transistor size. The fundamentals of physics block increases in clock speed. Light can only travel ~11cm in 1 billionth of a second (1GHz). Electricity can only ever move at 50%-99% the speed of light dependent on the conductor. What's the point of having a 1THz clock when you will just be wasting most of those clock cycles propagating signals across the chip or waiting on data moving to/from memory. Increasing clock speed increases cost of use because it requires more power so at some point a trade-off decision must be made.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moor...
Comparing raw CPU speed seems like a bad metric. A new i5 clocked at 3.1Ghz will absolutely wipe the floor with a 3.4Ghz Pentium, even for single threaded workloads
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Pentium-4-340GHz...
EDIT: for something to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_nanometer
I guess it's the same as LEDs.. watts/lumen.
They're not lying, it's commercial real estate.
Due to the fact that making a 7nm gate width is not only impractical (even the most advanced EUV lithography can't do it) but also would make the transistors work terribly--the fact that everyone form 2005 was referring to--the industry was forced to innovate. Their clever solution was to change their naming convention, and instead of naming each technology node after the actual gate width they just assign them a arbitrary number which follows moores law. [1]
The actual gate width for a '7nm' process is somewhat ill defined (they look nothing like a textbook transistor), but depending on how you measure it the number comes in somewhere between 30-60nm. [2] Note that there is a number in the 7nm dimensional chart that comes in at 6nm, but that is the gate oxide thickness, and is actually getting _thicker_ over time. For example back in 90nm it was 1-2nm thick.
That said, those skeptical of us ever producing a '7nm' transistor back in 2005 were right--by the naming convention used in 2005 we are still at ~40nm. I am sure that you will be able to buy a '2nm' processor according to the roadmap, but the actual transistors are still going to have a gate width closer to 30nm and their electrical performance is going to be within a factor of 2 of our current '7nm', and honestly probably going to be clocked slower.
A 45nm process:
i7-880, 45nm
774 million transistors
296 mm2
i7-6700k, 14nm
1.75 billion transistors
122 mm²
The expected scaling is that transistor density should have scaled with gate length squared (since the structures are laid out in a 2-D grid, for example the 0.8um process used in the 8088 had a sram density of 120um^2, compared to 1um^2 squared for 90nm, a factor of 120x for a roughly 10 times smaller process), so one would have expected a 165x improvement moving from 90nm to 7nm.
Unsurprisingly, the missing factor of 5 is the same factor between the process node name ('7nm') and actual gate length (~35nm).