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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

This comparison is somewhat disingenuous. Why would they compare 3nm to 5mm, when the current TSMC process is 4nm, not 5nm? We don't know how (un)impressive the improvements of the 3nm process are, when we don't know how much of the difference between 5nm and 3nm merely comes from the difference between between 5nm and 4nm.

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From what I have read, 4nm is not really a significant process change and is really just a variant of 5nm. There have been only minimal improvements in chips going form 5nm to 4nm as a result. 3nm really is different.

"There have been only minimal improvements in chips going form 5nm to 4nm as a result."

I'd like to see evidence for that, i.e. that the change from 4nm to 3nm offers significantly larger efficiency improvements than the change from 5nm to 4nm.

Those numbers are just for marketing. There is no feature on the chip that is actually 5 nm, 4 nm, or whatever.

That's highly irrelevant for my point, which would still stand if the process generations were named differently.

The chip industry articles I have seen say that 4nm is not mean fully smaller than 5nm and really can be just considered a version of 5nm. I don’t have the background to give you more than that but the message has been consistent across multiple tech writers.

You can see it in the smaller performance gains of 4nm A16 chips vs 4nm A15 chips from Apple.

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