Hasn't the tech community known this for years?
Who is the "tech community"? I was unaware of this, but it's not really relevant to my work as a software engineer.
5nm is only a marketing term and has no relation to any actual phyiscal feature
11–20 of 39 posts
Re: 5nm is only a marketing term and has no relation to any actual phyiscal feature
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone have to care about this implementation detail?
For one thing, it makes it harder for me to understand when it will be necessary for new processors to use exotic materials. Since I've learned about the naming, and that processors have not actually reached the 5nm physical limit for silicon, it feels wrong to perpetuate it.
> For one thing, it makes it harder for me to understand when it will be necessary for new processors to use exotic materials.
If you have a need to understand this, shouldn't you be close enough to the field to discern marketing speak from the underlying technical details?
Re: 5nm is only a marketing term and has no relation to any actual phyiscal feature
#13This is mind boggling once you start to dig into it!! A lot of information from two reddit threads the last time I looked into this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jwgdld/what_is_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/ECE/comments/jxb806/how_big_are_tra...
Re: 5nm is only a marketing term and has no relation to any actual phyiscal feature
#14I've been curious, if this is true, why hasn't intel moved the goalpost for 7nm and declared victory, rather than the constant black eye of not having achieved that "marketing" number for years?
That's what they did; the current Alder Lake is on "7" (not 7nm, just 7).
Re: 5nm is only a marketing term and has no relation to any actual phyiscal feature
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
For one thing, it makes it harder for me to understand when it will be necessary for new processors to use exotic materials. Since I've learned about the naming, and that processors have not actually reached the 5nm physical limit for silicon, it feels wrong to perpetuate it.
> For one thing, it makes it harder for me to understand when it will be necessary for new processors to use exotic materials. If you have a need to understand this, shouldn't you be close enough to the field to discern marketing speak from the underlying technical details?
If you're going to devise some marketing-speak, shouldn't you be able to do it in a way that doesn't just happen to be an actual lie?
Re: 5nm is only a marketing term and has no relation to any actual phyiscal feature
#16Disappointed that Intel had to change their naming because otherwise they'd lose out in marketing honestly. Corporations can't be truthful because a competitor won't be.
Truth doesn't really come into it. The old Intel "10nm" didn't have any 10nm features and the new Intel "7" doesn't have 7nm features.
Re: 5nm is only a marketing term and has no relation to any actual phyiscal feature
#17It really feels like this should be illegal.
Why? The average consumer doesn't care whether the semiconductor in their smartphones are 7nm or 5nm, they care about speed and power efficiency. Anyone who does care about feature size/density would know this and wouldn't be misled. Besides, they themselves don't care about feature sizes either, they only really care about other performance characteristics (eg. density, power consumption, switching speed), not some superficial metric like "nm".
Re: 5nm is only a marketing term and has no relation to any actual phyiscal feature
#18Some technical people plain refuse to read technical sites about hardware and prefer to read marketing aimed at completely non technical people. Read https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/5_nm_lithography_process
Re: 5nm is only a marketing term and has no relation to any actual phyiscal feature
#19But EUV is a real thing and cleanly divides the haves and the have nots. While Intel 7 may have similar density to TSMC 7, there is a huge difference in the process and cost of making them. Intel will not go beyond that without EUV, and neither will anyone else.
Re: 5nm is only a marketing term and has no relation to any actual phyiscal feature
#20Hasn't the tech community known this for years?
Who is the "tech community"? I was unaware of this, but it's not really relevant to my work as a software engineer.
Apologies, I assumed it was mostly common knowledge among people who keep up with tech news. I began seeing stories about it at least a few years ago so I figured many of us had heard at this point.