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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

the "nm" doesn't mean what you think it means, since some time ago it's become unrelated to actual physical dimensions, and now it just means "a better process".

EDIT: for something to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_nanometer

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So it’s marketing speak.

Not exactly, it means something like "it has the same transistor density as if we shrunk transistors from about 20 years ago to 1.4 nanometers"

This comment is the first time I've seen the why of this number explained, thanks. Like, makes sense, it must be tied to some relative scale that's vaguely comparable across companies otherwise it's just kind of silly. I obviously can understand the 'marketing speak' argument but past a certain point it becomes literally nonsense if people are just using arbitrary numbers.

Never knew.. Ok.. so instead of nm, it is used as density. Shouldn't they just be using transistors per mm2, or maybe per cubic micron? mu3?

I guess it's the same as LEDs.. watts/lumen.

Apparently it's easier to do some hocuspocus and use nm than transition to Transistors per square micrometer. See this chart of how they relate:

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/File:5nm_densities.svg

One extra complicating factor is that each process node will have several different transistor libraries that make different tradeoffs between density and power/frequency. So a smartphone SoC will tend to have a higher MT/mm^2 number than a server CPU or GPU.

Yeah, the difference is more or less a factor of 3. The node gives you a smallest transistor size but making some transistors bigger than others lets you reach higher frequencies.

Thanks for this - great explanation!

A Louis Rossmann meme that spawned a coffee mug:

They're not lying, it's commercial real estate.

https://youtu.be/7Tzz7-aOKHU?t=2m04s

Shrinkage!

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