Ok I think I do know the answer but I never learned it, so I want to learn it today. It’s been about 1 year now we can reliably make 3nm chips, which is impressive on a scale of size. But why is is better? My theory is simply: We can make a product the same size but add more on it because it’s smaller, making it stronger and faster for more complex operations. Which would mean it’s not the chip that’s impressive on its own, just the size of it.
Or there is something else, and I’d love to get the full explanation and understand chips better
Disclaimer: not an expert, this is just how I understand it after some googling:
There isn’t a single standard for 3nm, despite the seemingly obvious size-related connotations. It’s more of a marketing term used by chip manufacturers to refer to their version of the next generation of chip-making processes they each have to create something smaller than the previous revision.
Any time you shrink a processor you’re using less materials, which means it’s cheaper and allows more room for other things.
Less materials also means less resistance, so a smaller chip is inherently either more power efficient, faster, or a little of both (depending on the chip and the design the manufacturer decides to go with).
You are literally correct, the best kind of correct.
Power efficiency and the amount of components you can fit into the same area are the big reasons.
3nm isn’t what you use for regular run-of-the-mill chips like voltage regulators and ADCs. It’s for things like processors, where you have a metric buttload of complexity all in a tiny package.
We can’t really clock silicon much faster than we do now, so speed increases come from having more cores, more pipelines, and more complicated tricks that let you do more with the same clock speed. People don’t want to buy new devices that aren’t faster than their old devices.
Taiwanese fabs have pushed the state of the art for quite some time now, so if China is catching up then that will get some people’s attention. But Chinese fabs generally don’t participate in the global supply chain so I personally think it’s not going to have much impact in the west.