![]() Buried amidst paragraphs of flowery prose in the press release announcing the company's first 28nm graphics card, there was one short and almost reluctant mention of nanometers, and its significance was left unexplained: The result: NVIDIA's marketing machine doesn't spend much time talking about transistor size. It's a similar story with NVIDIA's Tegra 3 chips for smartphones and tablets, which, at 40nm, are numerically closer to 2011's processors than to newer 32nm and 28nm competitors. Its latest 600-series graphics cards use a mix of 28nm and 40nm chips, which are no better (in terms of transistor size) than AMD's latest 28nm graphics cards. Usually this is because manufacturers themselves have a schizophrenic attitude: they yell about it when their transistors are nice and small, but then treat the whole topic as irrelevant when their transistors happen to be lumpier than the competition's.Ī case in point: NVIDIA has some great products on the market right now, but in terms of transistor size it doesn't have much to gloat about. Sometimes we make a big deal out of a processor and its innards, while other times we barely mention it. When it comes to the importance (or otherwise) of the nanometer, journalists often don't help. ![]() Table of Contents What the packaging says Bearing that in mind, we're going to look at how some key players in the silicon industry treat this topic, and we'll try to deliver some practical, offal-free information in the process. Wouldn't that make for an easier life? Well, maybe, but whichever way you look at it, it's hard to stop this subject descending into pure philosophy, on a par with other yawnsome puzzles like whether meat-eaters should visit an abattoir at least once, or whether it's better to medicate the ailment or the person. In other words, a phone with a 28-nanometer (nm) processor ought to be fundamentally superior to one with a 45nm chip, and a PC running on silicon with features etched at 22nm should deliver more performance-per-watt than a 32nm rival.īut if that's true, isn't it equally sensible to focus on the end results? Instead of getting bogged down in semiconductor theory, we may as well let Moore's Law churn away in the background while we judge products based on their overall user experience. That's because, as transistors get tinier and more tightly packed, electrons don't have to travel so far when moving between them - saving both time and energy. Whether it's a CPU, graphics card, smartphone or tricorder, it'll always receive the Holy Grail combo of greater performance and reduced power consumption if it's built around a chip with a smaller fabrication process. Welcome to one of the most unnecessarily complicated questions in the world of silicon-controlled gadgets: should a savvy customer care about the underlying nature of the processor in their next purchase? Theoretically at least, the answer is obvious.
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