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What happens next? 1nm and then what?


Turn it down to -11nm, I guess. Maybe go back to jacking up the clock speed. But it probably will be materials related: lower the pathway resistance which lowers heat which reduces power requirements which allows a higher clock speed.
 
It is never going to get smaller than a decent number of silicon atoms, that’s the key measurement instead of talking about a certain number of angstroms.
 
Smaller nodes does not mean smaller chips, they will stay the same or even grow cause more functionality is offered, requiring more transistors thus little impact to overall chip size
Yes the process naming is misleading.


Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s leading contract manufacturer of chips, has today officially announced its N4P process, which is an enhanced version of the company’s 5nm platform.

This new N4P process marks the third enhancement of TSMC‘s 5nm process and is claimed to offer around an 11 percent hike in performance over the original N5 technology and around 6 percent improvement over the N4 process. As for the power efficiency, the company claims 22 percent better efficiency compared to the original N5 technology and the transistor density is also said to be 6 percent higher.
Going from a architecture of 5nm to 4nm would mean a lot higher density, not a transistor density of 6% higher only.
 
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This is the very first I've heard of 4nm !

Prior to this, the Consensus had been 3nm.

Over the past few days a number of other websites have been reporting TSMC's problems with 3nm, so Apple deciding to go with 4nm is NO real surprise.

But, I would have expected MR to have a 3nm chip with an X over it, next to the 4nm chip, for "rumor clarity," instead of sort of Hyping 4nm, which in this case, is clearly a set-back / fallback for Apple !

BTW, nothing wrong with the Enhanced 5nm process node Apple used for their A15 & latest M1 chips !

Cleary process node advancement is slowing down @ TSMC, though !
 
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>> While the DigiTimes report said "Apple will likely adopt TSMC's 4nm process," TSMC refers to the process as "N4P" and describes it as a "third major enhancement of TSMC's 5nm family." <<

So this is essentially saying 3nm isn't panning out and TSMC is doing a revision of 5nm (this is how things began for Intel trying to move beyond 14nm and then getting stuck there). Hopefully TSMC can overcome the issues for the iPhone 15 (late 2023).
 
IMO, improvements in CPUs are kinda boring nowadays. The chip in the current iPhone will be good enough for years and years to come without any signs of slowdown. Chips on phones today are way more advanced than the software they run.
 
Hate to burst everyone's bubble but there is nothing on these chips that is actually 4nm in dimensions just like the current 5-6-7nm processes that every chip manufacturer is making. It's all a historical node naming convention.
Exactly. Everyone really thinks that 4nm is the true size. It’s one of the problems Intel ran into. Just go ahead and call it -3nm already and get ahead of the competition.
 
I still don’t understand what is 5 mm. The chip? The tools that made the chip?

It has historically referred to the transistor width*. The narrower the transistor, the more transistors you can fit in the same amount of space. You also typically see less energy leakage as the size shrinks. This miniaturization has been the single biggest driver of increased personal computing power over the last several decades.

*As others have noted, companies have shifted to referring to transistor size as a marketing tactic, so a chip labeled "5nm" may not actually be 5nm in size:

 
A4 was 45nm from 45 to 4 in 12 years. or 45 to 5 in 10. Freaking remarkable.
“nm” is just a marketing ploy, it doesn’t really denote size.

Your comment is the same as saying: “it’s remarkable how Apple traveled into the future and brought back the iPhone X, skipping the iPhone 9. Freaking remarkable”

It’s interesting to see how many people fall for this, I don’t know why automakers don’t just start releasing 2024 model year vehicles this winter! ?
 
I keep wondering when we are going to hit a wall with processors. So far manufactures have found creative ways to continue to improve performance.
After FinFET transistors is GAAFET transistors, which have been demonstrated at the 5 nm process. So there's a road ahead, for now.

TSMC chose to stick with FinFET for its 3 nm process, which might explain some of the issues. Pure speculation on my part.
 
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Imagine if we had that when C19 hit... not only would we humans get sick, but also all of our technology :p

Believe it or not, that was the subplot of a Voyager episode. Macrocosm - basically a "Die Hard meets Star Trek" episode...
 
Turn it down to -11nm, I guess. Maybe go back to jacking up the clock speed. But it probably will be materials related: lower the pathway resistance which lowers heat which reduces power requirements which allows a higher clock speed.
Iirc Germanium is supposed to be the next step after silicon
 
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