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It's been decades since published node sizes had any connection to actual feature size. Sadly this is just how it works in the semiconductor industry now.
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As it can be seen from the photos, horizontally the features are much bigger than 5 nm.

For silicon, the gate length of a FET has a lower limit somewhere between 10 nm and 15 nm.

The current CMOS manufacturing processes have not reached the limit yet. For making smaller transistors, a transition to other semiconductor materials will be necessary.

The vertical thicknesses of various layers may be of only a few nanometers or even of a fraction of a nanometer, but that does not matter directly for the circuit density.

The supposed node size refers to horizontal dimensions, not to vertical dimensions.

Vertical dimensions of around 1 nanometer or less could be achieved already many decades ago, because they depend on growth speed and on time, not on lithography, like the horizontal dimensions.

The industry should have stopped decades ago to talk about the "size" but they should have characterized a CMOS process by its density, e.g. in logic gates per square mm.

However, an actual concrete number would be disliked by marketing, because they could no longer claim that their "1 nm" process is better than the "2 nm" process of another vendor, if their density is not really better.

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Just get better marketers to say your 2nm process has more gates per sqmm than your competition 1nm process.
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My read on it was that they are trying to imply a transistor density (in a 2D plane sense) that is comparable to a 1nm process? But they achieve that through stacking (3D, not 2D) since the features aren't actually anywhere near 1nm?
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If they're adding a dimension, the marketing should reflect that.

I know they won't go for an anything that makes as much sense as 5nm3, so I vote for "1nm hyper space"

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“TeraThread”
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> Continuing the well established trend of making bold claims about physical dimensions that have nothing to do with any of the structures in the chip, and the name scales better than the tech.

We care about PPA (power, performance, area) and not how large or not-large features actually are. Comparing gate lengths between a 1980s planar transistor and a 2010s 3D FinFET or GAA transistor is obviously nonsense, the relatively aligned node names of the industry actually do make sense as a shortcut here.

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You have to admit it's getting progressively sillier though.
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Better metrics are transistors/mm^2, performance/watt, and raw performance, since at this point "nm" is fluff and easily game-able.

Different companies measure it differently too. This was a while ago, but I remember reading that Intel 10nm was more or less close to TSMC 7nm. I'm sure this is still true to varying degrees.

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yeah, where on the pictures is the 0.7nm feature? The linespacing is around 5nm. Is it the white line which is 0.7nm?
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I really can't see where the 0.7nm is coming from. The white line looks like it's just an edge of a feature that is "15 rows of silicon atoms", which by some quick arithmetic on Wolfram Alpha has to be AT LEAST ~1.6nm, and the way the rows of atoms appear to be packed in that image and by the provided scale, it seems to be significantly more. Using the white line as a meaningful measurement seems to me to be more misleading than any other interpretation here.
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It's the equivalent performance of a 0.7 nm planar transistor. It's not about the feature size.
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On the otherhand, no investor really cares what it's called, they just need to know it's next gen.
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