We've gone from playing text-based Zork on a machine that weighs as much as a child
to having 4K video cameras in our pockets in the space of only about 40 years.
And a huge reason behind that is that we've been able to fit more and more transistors into our processors over the years.
Transistors are the tiny building blocks of electronics that form logic gates that enable your gadgets to think.
These days, we've gotten accustomed to transistors that are somewhere between 5 and 20 nanometers wide.
That's 5 to 20 billionths of a meter to power our electronic toys.
To put that into perspective, CPUs with 600 nanometer transistors came on the scene in 1994,
meaning they've shrunk by over 100 times since then, which has enabled us to build processors that are far more powerful.
But now we're getting to the point where transistors are so small that we may have to start measuring them in terms of angstroms rather than nanometers.
And although this might sound like just another marketing move, there are a couple of reasons behind it.
As the transistors get this small, it becomes impossible to express their sizes in integers anymore
if you stick with the traditional nanometer system. It just doesn't go that low.
Each time we shrink down to a new size of transistor or process node, the amount the size decreases also sounds less impressive.
In other words, going from 22 nanometers to 10 is just as important as when we went from 600 to 250.
So as we get down below 2 nanometers, generational improvements might not sound like a big deal
if we express them as having transistors that are only a fraction of a nanometer smaller.
But in reality, it's a big increase of the number of transistors actually on the chip.
Intel already has plans to switch to the angstrom system,
and they're on record saying that they want to start producing 20A chips in 2024.
That's the same as 2 nanometers. Team Blue was planning for 18 angstroms to follow the next year, and to put that into context,
a single silicon atom is about two angstroms in diameter.
So chip manufacturers are quickly starting to run up against the limits of silicon as a base material.
Intel plans to pull this off by redesigning transistors to be more space efficient,
such as with their gate all around approach, which you can learn more about in this video.
The general objective behind gate all around is to give the chip greater control over current flow,
which can be a problem with such small transistors as well as enabling transistors to be stacked atop each other more easily,
allowing for the chip maker to cram even more transistors into a CPU.
Another key to the process is extreme ultraviolet lithography, or EUV,
which uses shortwave UV light to extra smaller and smaller transistors into the silicon.
Intel has been slow to adopt EUV compared to Samsung and TSMC,
and the fact that there are only a handful of EUV machines in the world,
and just one company makes them, hasn't helped.
But Intel is expected to be the first company to get their hands on a high-annay EUV machine,
which provides the type of UV light that's needed to etch such tiny transistors.
Of course, Intel doesn't have the best track record when it comes to getting new chip designs off the ground,
but they're hoping this new manufacturing process will help them avoid delays
such as their well-publicized difficulties with their 10nm chips.
All of this being said, one thing to keep in mind is that the exact numbers being slapped on a CPUs
like 10nm and 20 angstrom aren't exact.
There actually isn't an industry-standard method of measuring transistors sizes,
meaning that AMD's 10nm and Intel's 10nm aren't exactly the same.
Intel, for their part, is suddenly acknowledging this by simply naming upcoming nodes
Intel 7, Intel 5, Intel 3, and Intel 20a
without actually including nanometer or angstrom or anything like that in the official designation.
But regardless of exactly how small their newer processes will be,
Intel is hoping that its new chip designs will not only make them more competitive with AMD,
but also with Samsung and TSMC.
Team Blue is hoping that by using newer UV tech to make more power-efficient chips,
they'll be chosen as a contract manufacturer of smartphone CPUs.
A key area that Intel hasn't tried to compete in in many years.
Rip at a mobile.
I just hope it doesn't lead some kind of fanboy war where one day mobile gamers
will scream at each other in YouTube comments over Intel vs Samsung chips.
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maybe what was that other Intel one we did earlier?
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