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Of an individual silicon atom, apparently. I'd think the "grid size" of silicon crystals might be more relevant, and that's not necessarily the same number... Hmm. 0.235nm between atoms, 1/30th of 7nm. (Though, precisely what does the 7nm number measure?)
Nobody knows anymore, it’s kind of feature size, but everyone defines feature differently!
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That's interesting but to put it in perspective I need to know how it relates to a human hair or how many times it can circle the earth.
If I've used Wolfram Alpha correctly, a 7nm span of silicon circles the earth 5.4874958×10^-16 times at the equator.
7nm is about 35 times the diameter of a silicon atom.
It sure is, but 7nm in cpu lithography doesn't mean anything, it's pure marketing. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process > The term "7 nm" is simply a commercial name for a generation of a certain size and its technology and does not represent any geometry of a transistor.
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More electron apps.
That's more of a memory bottleneck though.
I noticed yesterday's articles about Intel's upcoming unusually large release of security mitigations. Under serious competitive threat for the first time in a while, I'm curious if Intel may have slowed the release of some mitigations to land after this round of comparison benchmarks.
edit: Below is wrong, see author of article's reply below for why. Preserving for record.
They have been holding back review samples of their latest i9s so reviewers wouldn't do head-to-heads with this new 3950X (but people have anyway, and the 3950X crushes the i9). See Linus Tech Tip's review of the 3950X this morning for citation.
This isn't the most groundbreaking release - it's not the first 16-core chip you can buy (edited), nor the first 7nm. No new clockspeed records were set. Still, $750 for all that power! Any professionals shopping for this, or waiting for 24 or 32-core Threadripper? Anyone trying to upgrade on an older motherboard, or are you getting a matching X570 to ensure maximum boost and PCI-e bandwidth?
I find it interesting how desktop CPUs are essentially coming down to two enthusiast markets, developers/content creators/workstations and gaming. While the gaming market is (usually) seeking the highest top single core clock speed with respect to CPUs, it also relies on other expensive hardware. Meanwhile the dev/content creator/workstation market is much better served by these multi-core behemoths. Intel really has…
Hopefully going forward that will change, but even with Red Dead Redemption 2's Vulkan implementation, a 6 core Intel/AMD chip is competitive with this processor at lower settings/resolutions where the GPU is less of a bottleneck.
Compute bound games like Civilization 6 do scale with processor count however.
I find it interesting how desktop CPUs are essentially coming down to two enthusiast markets, developers/content creators/workstations and gaming. While the gaming market is (usually) seeking the highest top single core clock speed with respect to CPUs, it also relies on other expensive hardware. Meanwhile the dev/content creator/workstation market is much better served by these multi-core behemoths. Intel really has…
Servers and huge workstations I guess are like 18-wheelers and locomotives. :)
The "mobile is the future of everything" people were wrong. It's not that desktop is going away, but the market is re-segmenting. Most casual users don't need a desktop. They just need a UI device that can run apps and access services. So you now have a bisection of the computing device market into pro/workplace type devices and casual user devices. I suppose there's a third category too: hobbyist and enthusiast devices. That's where I'd put things like the Raspberry Pi or more techie geared laptops that run Linux.
I predict that rather than converging with mobile, desktop will actually pivot more toward pro, developer, and power user needs. Apple's recent 16 inch Pro release is a baby step in that direction on the hardware level. You'll probably see it at the software and OS level too. Desktop might actually shed a little bit of its user-friendliness gloss in favor of being unabashedly "pro." "If you don't want to know what a network, a folder, a file, or an IP address is, get a tablet."