I find it strange, that in this strictly B2B market, where target audience is just dozen hundreds/thousands chip design engineers, they still use BS marketing. There is no physical dimension of 5nm anywhere, neither there were for "7nm" or "10nm" processes.
>I find it strange, that in this strictly B2B market...
Except it is not, It is very much consumer marketing. Look at how all their Chip Vendors proudly market themselves as 7nm, or first to EUV.
Samsung Foundry started this whole thing, and TSMC CEO said during an investor conference their customers were asking for smaller nm because "another" foundry were using those numbers.
At the end of the day, all we have to know is that each full node has roughly 2x density improvement over previous node. And we still have 5nm, 3nm, 2nm, 1.4nm and 1nm coming up. Someday Moore's Law will indeed be dead, but for now at least we have another 5 - 6 years to go. I am happy I will get even more powerful GPU down the line.
Samsung Foundry started this whole thing, and TSMC CEO said during an investor conference their customers were asking for smaller nm because "another" foundry were using those numbers.
That's not consumer marketing. That's still B2B, except the audience is management instead of engineering as assumed in the GP. TSMC's customers are not consumers. Set up costs run into the millions of dollars.
After the whole gigahertz wars, there aren't many consumers that are savvy enough to know that you want fewer nanometers.
It’s “prosumer” marketing, for system builders who actually care about CPU bin numbers and serial numbers and stuff like that. There are both diy’ers and actual high-end PC vendors and system integrators in that category, and given they tend to spend more than the average consumer, probably can’t be ignored.
It is also marketing to investors. If your employee package includes some options or shares e.g. management, you want to pump your investor base, many of whom are not specialists in the sector.
It's "ingredient branding" now. I think the foundaries are becoming the "ingredient" more consumers and looking at, similar to how Intel famously pushed their CPU as the important ingredient in PCs. I think it will be a very good decade for TSMC/Samsung/GF(?) similar to Intel's 90's/2000's.
It's a very common marketing practice for companies like Intel to market through to consumers in order to generate demand. Intel runs a end user facing campaign for "Intel Inside" this drives computer vendors to want to incorporate Intel parts into their machines because they can use this branding to sell machines. It's the same with 7nm, TSMC is doing this so that Tim Cook can stand up at WWDC and say some bullshit like "The worlds first consumer 5nm CPU". Because marketing needs a spec to brag about, the average consumer isn't looking at Cinebench scores.
Look at the dimensions of an old planar transistor design. Switch to a new design with completely different dimensions that massively increases density. Calculate how small the old transistor design would have to be to have the same density as the new design.
That's how they came up with numbers like 7nm. It makes a lot of sense because the transistor designs keep changing and no matter what physical feature you measure an accurate number would become irrelevant with the next manufacturing process.
The nm numbers are just an attempt to extrapolate using the transistor density increase. 5 nm means something like "it has the same transistor density as if we shrunk transistors from about 20 years ago to 5 nanometers". It's more familiar to people than transitioning to "transistors per square micrometer".
Apple got up on a stage and proudly boasted that they were shipping a phone with a 7nm chip. It was global news.
It might strictly be B2B for TMSC but it’s not B2B in general. Customers of TMSC want to market these silly designations and TMSC is more than willing to play along.
