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14nm and 7nm are NOT what you think it is - Visiting Tescan Part 3/3

der8auer · 296.1K views · 2020-09-21 · 20:08

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Overview

Der8auer visits Tescan and uses an electron microscope to compare real transistor sizes on Intel 14nm and AMD 7nm chips. It shows that process node names do not match physical measurements.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as visual evidence that nm node names are marketing labels and for its neat electron microscope comparison.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2020–2021

Topics

Semiconductors & chip manufacturingComputer architecture & CPUs
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14nm7nmelectron microscopetransistorsintel vs amd

What people said

datagram · 2021-04 · Recommendation

Like others have said, the numbers aren't comparable between manufacturers. Here's a neat video where they use an electron microscope to actually compare the transistor sizes for Intel 14nm and AMD 7nm: [VIDEO]

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ece · 2021-03 · Reference

This reminds me of seeing a part of the chip from a scanning electron microscope: [VIDEO] But I wonder how successful these methods are are extracting keys from a TPM or other hardware keys.

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quag · 2020-09 · Reference

According to this video using an electron scanning microscope on amd and Intel chips, the “7nm” or “10nm” number does not measure anything, and is effectively a process version number for marketing. From memory there is no single number for measuring transistors or efficiency, transistor density is useful, but it doesn’t tell you the performance or power usage. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by der8auer, played through YouTube.

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