As a computer scientist rather than an EE, I learned a lot from this article. I would like to provide some perspective as a person who buys and looks at processor advances in the consumer market with a technical, but not too technical, background.
Unlike a sibling comment, I never knew that the lithography process did not correspond to any physical characteristic in the chip. I naively assumed that the headlines saying that Intel was behind in process technology were correct, and used that to inform purchasing decisions. I found the article enlightening, and I think many on HN with the same background as myself will agree.
As an aside, I tried to read the linked IEEE paper [1] but the page is cut off for me below section 2. If anyone has a link to the full PDF, I would appreciate that.
[1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=906...
no mention of https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/mtr-mm%C2%B2 ?
Aka the numbers are made up.
Not convinced it’s a problem though. Intel seems to be doing fine with their farcical 14+++ naming
This whole thing seems like a wrong take. I don’t think TMSC even registers Intel as competition these days.
Intel vs X is a tiny market. Most CPUs don’t go in x86 machines, and the chip companies choose fabs on so many more variables than just “nm”. Products pick chips on higher level stats than that: price, power, performance, features, footprint, heat, etc.
Consumers usually don’t know or care what CPU is in their device (phones, tablets, watches, doorbells, coffee mugs, etc). They pick for features, fashion, and product ecosystem.
And the cloud/data center market (maybe the last bastion of x86) only cares about price + performance per watt.
I think the only people who pay attention to this stuff are PC gamers, and they’re a niche within a niche. And even that is more of a Ford vs Chevy market of brand loyalty.
Maybe some market analysts use it to ding Intel, but I think that’s a minor detail in a much gloomier picture.
In my view, there might be uses for different kinds of units, depending on what you care about. Nanometers are interesting to me because they relate to progress in lithography technology. Nodes or gates per acre tells us something. Achievable information storage or bandwidth per acre tells us something else.
Perhaps we should migrate to a "6502s per square milimeter" metric or something?
Related article (that was previously discussed on HN): https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/a-better-wa...
It covers the LMC proposal mentioned in this article, but also another proposal more similar to the current node naming, but instead of using the gate length, using a combination of gate pitch (minimum distance between two transistors) and metal pitch (minimum distance between two wires).
I do not understand why would anyone care about nanometers at all. There are power efficiency, performance, reliability, price/value characteristics that are more important to an average consumer than the lithography process size.
So nanometres are the new megahertz.
(2020)
No one beyond chip nerds like myself ever really hear or care about node stepping and we all know it's more of a name than anything meaningful.
Intel don't market the node itself to consumers but rather the architectural generation. The whole 10 vs 7nm does not generate a perception of Intel being behind but rather they now are behind with the move to TSMC 5nm and the fact Intel still can't get volume production from 10nm for any product line that requires top performance.
The cynic in me feels that this is recent FUD originated in Intel marketing to try and smoke screen the disaster that is Intel 10nm. A little too late imo.
It's not that 10nn is bad but rather how long they've actually been working on it. If it had only taken twice as long to get to volume production they would have been well a ahead of the competition, remember the old tick/tock.
Arguably 10nm was suppose to be here in 2016, but only actually went into production in 2018, hence the the 14nm+++, and it's still not there yet.