this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
225 points (91.5% liked)
Technology
59284 readers
4276 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It very much does matter. A large driver of pushing to smaller scale is to increase the amount of transistors and traces they can fit in a given space for reasons of both manufacturing and practical issues.
If they tried to make a modern CPU using the manufacturing scale of yesteryear, they'd have to use multiple wafers to make a single chip.
Can you imagine how big a modern CPU (7ish nm) design would end up if it were made using the same scale as even a Pentium Pro/Pentium 2 (300nm)?? They would be 42times larger!! Just try fitting one of those in a laptop. And that's ignoring the timing issues you'd have with the traces being so long between sections of the CPU.