Chipmaking Is Being Redesigned
> Today’s state-of-the-art is five-nanometre chips (though “5nm” no longer refers to the actual size of transistors as earlier generations did).<p>It's refreshing to see this mentioned. I'm no semiconductor expert, but it seems weird to me that although node size is measured in a physical unit, nanometers, it does not correspond to any real measurement that exists [1]. Each transistor in a 5nm chip is actually between 28 and 36 nanometers in width. It's called 5nm because of a theoretical calculation based on transistor density [2].<p>If Tesla advertised a new "200kWh" battery, I would be very disappointed if it turned out that the battery only held 95kWh, but the marketing department had decided that improvements in the charging network have made it "like 200kWh" compared to earlier models.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Meaning_lost" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Meaning_lost</a>