wwenze
Greater Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2002
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I hear you. “The world has a billion problems, and nanometer nodes ain’t one!” But, hear me out. In the early, heady days of Moore’s Law, it made sense to characterize processes by gate length (Lg). We had about a gazillion semiconductor fabs around the world, and they needed some standardized way to, well, do anything at all, actually. But as the decades have marched past, describing semiconductor processes with length metrics based hypothetically on gate size has long since veered into the land of fiction.
Intel held the line from “10 micron” in 1972 through “0.35 micron” in 1995, an impressive 23-year run where the node name matched gate length. Then, in 1997 with the “0.25 micron/250 nm” node they started over-achieving with an actual Lg of 200 nm – 20% better than the name would imply. This “sandbagging” continued through the next 12 years, with one node (130nm) having Lg of only 70nm – almost a 2x buffer. Then, in 2011, Intel jumped over to the other side of the ledger, ushering in what we might call the “overstating decade” with the “22nm” node sporting an Lg of 26 nm. Since then, things have continued to slide further in that direction, with the current “10nm” node measuring in with an Lg of 18 nm – almost 2x on the other side of the “named” dimension.
So essentially, since 1997, the node name has not been a representation of any actual dimension on the chip, and it has erred in both directions by almost a factor of 2.
For the last few years, this has been a big marketing problem for Intel from a “perception” point of view. Most industry folks understand that Intel’s “10nm” process is roughly equivalent to TSMC and Samsung’s “7nm” processes. But non-industry publications regularly write that Intel has “fallen behind” because they are still back on 10nm when other fabs have “moved on to 7nm and are working on 5nm.” The truth is, these are marketing names only, and in no way do they represent anything we might expect in comparing competing technologies.
https://www.eejournal.com/article/no-more-nanometers/
The first 22nm was Ivy Bridge, which was not much of an improvement over Sandy Bridge.
Intel held the line from “10 micron” in 1972 through “0.35 micron” in 1995, an impressive 23-year run where the node name matched gate length. Then, in 1997 with the “0.25 micron/250 nm” node they started over-achieving with an actual Lg of 200 nm – 20% better than the name would imply. This “sandbagging” continued through the next 12 years, with one node (130nm) having Lg of only 70nm – almost a 2x buffer. Then, in 2011, Intel jumped over to the other side of the ledger, ushering in what we might call the “overstating decade” with the “22nm” node sporting an Lg of 26 nm. Since then, things have continued to slide further in that direction, with the current “10nm” node measuring in with an Lg of 18 nm – almost 2x on the other side of the “named” dimension.
So essentially, since 1997, the node name has not been a representation of any actual dimension on the chip, and it has erred in both directions by almost a factor of 2.
For the last few years, this has been a big marketing problem for Intel from a “perception” point of view. Most industry folks understand that Intel’s “10nm” process is roughly equivalent to TSMC and Samsung’s “7nm” processes. But non-industry publications regularly write that Intel has “fallen behind” because they are still back on 10nm when other fabs have “moved on to 7nm and are working on 5nm.” The truth is, these are marketing names only, and in no way do they represent anything we might expect in comparing competing technologies.
https://www.eejournal.com/article/no-more-nanometers/
The first 22nm was Ivy Bridge, which was not much of an improvement over Sandy Bridge.
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