this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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That seems... Illegal. Much the same as selling a "foot long" Sub or Hotdog which is only 11".
At the very least it's misleading.
What are you complaining about? We promised you three but you got 11! Those are bonus nanometers just for you.
Since feature size doesn't actually matter, The metric that large scale computer consumers use is application performance. The feature size kind of is just a talking point, it's not really fraud, since it doesn't have a direct impact on the measurable performance that actually matters.
If I had a 20 nanometer chip that performs better than a 7 nanometer chip, I still have the better chip, and I know in large-scale procurement, you often get free sample chips to run your applications on, to see how performant the new architecture will actually be... And that'll drive the bulk of the sales
It very much does matter. A large driver of pushing to smaller scale is to increase the amount of transistors and traces they can fit in a given space for reasons of both manufacturing and practical issues.
If they tried to make a modern CPU using the manufacturing scale of yesteryear, they'd have to use multiple wafers to make a single chip.
Can you imagine how big a modern CPU (7ish nm) design would end up if it were made using the same scale as even a Pentium Pro/Pentium 2 (300nm)?? They would be 42times larger!! Just try fitting one of those in a laptop. And that's ignoring the timing issues you'd have with the traces being so long between sections of the CPU.