…This increased “appetite” for 2 nm chips is likely due to the significant improvements this technology brings: it uses 24-35% less power, can run 15% faster at the same power level, and can fit 15% more transistors in the same space compared to the 3 nm chips. Apple will be the first company to use these chips, followed by other major tech companies like MediaTek, Qualcomm, Intel, NVIDIA, AMD, and Broadcom.
I thought we were approaching the theoretical size limit for transistors. Or are we going to have to start measuring fabs in picometers?
The node generation name hasn’t had anything to do with the actual physical sizes of anything in a while. It used to relate to physical gate length, but has basically moved off of that since 1994 or so.
Instead, the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems and previously the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, just gave rough guidelines of what specifications would translate to which node/generation, and the actual companies marketing their own technology tends to just give their own labels depending on what they think is useful.
I also remember reading that, but it seems like there are new developments, they could create transistors from single atoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-atom_transistor
The next size level used in fab process naming is Angstrom.
That’s why Intel has 18A fab process.
I remember hearing people say it was around 3nm already, but I guess not?
I’ve heard that we’ve reached the physical limit at the 14nm gen and everything since hasn’t actually been smaller but in practive works as if it were due to other improvements in design and manufacturing processes.
