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ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

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51–60 of 97 posts

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke but it does seem like we’re near the end of the line. We can go from 3 nm to 2 nm to 1 nm, but we can’t go negative nanometers. That’s it.

Next up is picometers, femtometers, attometers, zeptometers, yoctometers, rontometers, and quectometers (not to be confused with quesometers). They can just keep going until they hit the Planck length as they continue to divorce their marketing from reality.

Intel has gone with ångstroms.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for completeness, “2nm” is more like 12-45nm actual transistor size. So on average about 5 of these transistors could fit inside a single SARS-CoV-2 viron.

So it's not the vaccine, but Covid itself, that is going to deploy the 5G chips into people's bodies?

It’s insane how small transistors are now. Technically you could have a full 2 bit adder inside a single virion within a generation.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#54

Just to head off the inevitable comments about how 2nm isn't really 2nm: yes, we know, it's just a convention in the industry to indicate relative performance. It's basically a marketing term, more than anything else. The numbers VLSI engineers actually care about are things like millions of transistors per square millimeter (MTr/mm^2), power per bit in picojoules (pJ), transistor rise times in nanoseconds, etc... In…

I really hope they can all decide on a better number which everyone agrees on soon. It's ridiculous having to look up each time if Intel 10nm is the same as which one from TSMC again and all of that. There have been some contenders, but the lure of saying "hey, I have the smallest number, so my process is best!" is just too strong it seems.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next up is picometers, femtometers, attometers, zeptometers, yoctometers, rontometers, and quectometers (not to be confused with quesometers). They can just keep going until they hit the Planck length as they continue to divorce their marketing from reality.

Those units sound made up. Nobody will believe them.

Not too long ago nanometer was made up.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#56
post #16
post #13

Nigel Tufnel, chief scientist at TSMC, explains the merits of the latest hardware from ASML: "This is a fab, but it's very special because if you can see, the numbers all go down to 2nm. Look, right across the board. 2nm, 2nm, 2nm, 2nm ..." "And most of the fabs go down to 3." "Exactly." "Does that mean it's ... smaller? Is it any smaller?" "Well, it's one smaller, isn't it? It's not 3. You see, most fabs are going t…

Nice Spinal Tap parody... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven

Thanks to both! I didn't know about it, so I needed the clarification. The scene: https://youtu.be/4xgx4k83zzc

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke but it does seem like we’re near the end of the line. We can go from 3 nm to 2 nm to 1 nm, but we can’t go negative nanometers. That’s it.

Next up is picometers, femtometers, attometers, zeptometers, yoctometers, rontometers, and quectometers (not to be confused with quesometers). They can just keep going until they hit the Planck length as they continue to divorce their marketing from reality.

Not just # of atoms?

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#58
post #13

Nigel Tufnel, chief scientist at TSMC, explains the merits of the latest hardware from ASML: "This is a fab, but it's very special because if you can see, the numbers all go down to 2nm. Look, right across the board. 2nm, 2nm, 2nm, 2nm ..." "And most of the fabs go down to 3." "Exactly." "Does that mean it's ... smaller? Is it any smaller?" "Well, it's one smaller, isn't it? It's not 3. You see, most fabs are going t…

[deleted]

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#59
post #54

Just to head off the inevitable comments about how 2nm isn't really 2nm: yes, we know, it's just a convention in the industry to indicate relative performance. It's basically a marketing term, more than anything else. The numbers VLSI engineers actually care about are things like millions of transistors per square millimeter (MTr/mm^2), power per bit in picojoules (pJ), transistor rise times in nanoseconds, etc... In…

I really hope they can all decide on a better number which everyone agrees on soon. It's ridiculous having to look up each time if Intel 10nm is the same as which one from TSMC again and all of that. There have been some contenders, but the lure of saying "hey, I have the smallest number, so my process is best!" is just too strong it seems.

Have you considered that things are complicated enough now it can't be boiled down to single number comparisons?

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#60
post #54

Just to head off the inevitable comments about how 2nm isn't really 2nm: yes, we know, it's just a convention in the industry to indicate relative performance. It's basically a marketing term, more than anything else. The numbers VLSI engineers actually care about are things like millions of transistors per square millimeter (MTr/mm^2), power per bit in picojoules (pJ), transistor rise times in nanoseconds, etc... In…

I really hope they can all decide on a better number which everyone agrees on soon. It's ridiculous having to look up each time if Intel 10nm is the same as which one from TSMC again and all of that. There have been some contenders, but the lure of saying "hey, I have the smallest number, so my process is best!" is just too strong it seems.

Since Intel changed their node names you can roughly assume that for a given node TSMC > Intel > Samsung.

This might change in the future if Intel gets their shit together but I'm not buying their stock yet, they look like the Boeing of microchips to me.

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