What is nm?

[Wictorian]

What is it and what does that do?

[keskparane]

A newton meter is a measure of torque

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_metre Don't listen to silly old me. I've been schooled.

 

but Never Mind that

[Dreamer758]

I believe its the unit of measurement used to measure a CPU dye also known as NanoMeter the lower the better because it more efficient when it comes to power consumption and heat output

[Wictorian]

so, what does that do with the performance?

[NineEyeRon]

Femto or go home

[Dreamer758]

Just now, Wictorian said:

so, what does that do with the performance?

Lets the clock speeds run higher I assume because of less heat

[Skiiwee29]

3 minutes ago, Wictorian said:

so, what does that do with the performance?

https://www.engadget.com/2012/06/15/engadget-primed-nanometers/

[Guest]

Nanometres. It is a thousandth of a micrometer, which is a thousandth of a millimeter, which is a thousandth of a meter.

 

m, mm, micrometer, nanometer, picometre. Anything less and no one really cares.

[Enderman]

11 minutes ago, keskparane said:

A newton meter is a measure of torque

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_metre

 

but Never Mind that

nm is nanometer not newton meter (Nm)

 

7 minutes ago, Dreamer758 said:

Lets the clock speeds run higher I assume because of less heat

No, smaller does not always mean more efficient or less heat.

It just means there is more room to place transistors, or that the same amount of circuitry takes up less silicon.

 

In fact it usually means hotter because you have the same amount of heat produced in a smaller area, which means higher temperature.

[TheKDub]

10 minutes ago, keskparane said:

A newton meter is a measure of torque

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_metre

 

but Never Mind that

nm is nanometer, not newton meter (N m).

 

Newton meters are a measurement of torque, whereas nanometer is a measure of length. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanometre

[keskparane]

@Enderman @TheKDub 

[Dreamer758]

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

nm is nanometer not newton meter (Nm)

 

No, smaller does not always mean more efficient or less heat.

It just means there is more room to place transistors, or that the same amount of circuitry takes up less silicon.

 

In fact it usually means hotter because you have the same amount of heat produced in a smaller area, which means higher temperature.

Really? so why do console manufactres always shrink the dye when they want to make the console smaller and slimmer. Its not like the performance changes 

[Corwin111]

Yes, NM is a nanometre. In the context in which the OP is asking, nanometres are used to denote the length of each individual transistor in a CPU. Why this is important is because the smaller you make your transistors, the more you can cram into the same surface area. And surface area is important because above a certain size, a dye becomes extremely impractical to cool in home conditions.

 

When you come to think of it, the scale is pretty mind boggling... people make transistors now, which are just a few dozen ATOMS across and this is one of the most momentous human achievements to date

.

[Dreamer758]

2 minutes ago, Corwin111 said:

Yes, NM is a nanometre. In the context in which the OP is asking, nanometres are used to denote the length of each individual transistor in a CPU. Why this is important is because the smaller you make your transistors, the more you can cram into the same surface area. And surface area is important because above a certain size, a dye becomes extremely impractical to cool in home conditions.

 

When you come to think of it, the scale is pretty mind boggling... people make transistors now, which are just a few dozen ATOMS across. It is one of the most momentous human achievements so far.

wow I did not know that

[Wictorian]

I understood, well it is like how small a harddisk is and how much data it can hold, isn’t it? I remember the times when firs 128 gb phone and I was shocked! how the hell did you put that much data in a phone? and Microsoft put 100MBs of data in a drive sized as big as dna! so they just put transistors instead of data.

[Enderman]

5 minutes ago, Dreamer758 said:

Really? so why do console manufactres always shrink the dye when they want to make the console smaller and slimmer. Its not like the performance changes 

Making it smaller means it takes up less space on the silicon so you can get more chips per wafer.

There are thousands of other changes unrelated to process size that are done when designing a new CPU generation, those changes are what make efficiency improvements and performance improvements and other stuff.

[Sakkura]

52 minutes ago, Enderman said:

No, smaller does not always mean more efficient or less heat.

It just means there is more room to place transistors, or that the same amount of circuitry takes up less silicon.

 

In fact it usually means hotter because you have the same amount of heat produced in a smaller area, which means higher temperature.

A smaller transistor uses less power, which counteracts the effect of having more transistors per area.

 

Quantum tunnelling is causing issues now that transistors are getting ridiculously small though.

[Wictorian]

37 minutes ago, quakeguy81 said:

Weirdest thread. Ever. 

LMAO!

[Enderman]

11 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

A smaller transistor uses less power, which counteracts the effect of having more transistors per area.

 

Quantum tunnelling is causing issues now that transistors are getting ridiculously small though.

No.

Transistor size doesn't really do anything to efficiency.

[Sakkura]

4 hours ago, Enderman said:

No.

Transistor size doesn't really do anything to efficiency.

Ignoring leakage, the power consumption of active CMOS logic is given by P = 0.5CV²f, and the capacitance obviously corresponds with size.

 

It's just that leakage is messing more and more with this.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

 

Quote

as transistors get smaller, their power density stays constant, so that the power use stays in proportion with area

 

[Curious Pineapple]

Smaller transistors means smaller interconnects. Shorter interconnects means less resistance, capacitance, inductance, lower heat and faster achievable speeds. It's not just the transistors themselves that smaller processes affect.

[MadmanRB]

Okie I will put this into simple english just in case you are not familiar with how tech works.

A nanometer is on itself simply a unit of measurement, smaller than a centimeter, millimeter and micrometer.

In size comparison a human hair is 50 micrometers, meaning most things that are in nanometers are very tiny.

Most computer transistors are smaller than the common cold as a virus is 100nm

In fact the upcoming Zen 2 7nm processor will use transistors that are about the same size of a protein found in the human body...

Yup that tiny, 12 nm transistors are about the same size as hemoglobin a protien found in blood.

Now how does this effect performance, well the smaller a transistor is the more you can pack into a silicone die and the more transistors you have the higher the performance (well there is more to it than that but Curious pineapple covered this bit pretty well).

This means when we start making transistors that are 5nm they will be only a little bigger than a molecule!

[wasab]

It's is the metric unit denoting a billionth of a meter. 

[Enderman]

5 hours ago, Sakkura said:

Ignoring leakage, the power consumption of active CMOS logic is given by P = 0.5CV²f, and the capacitance obviously corresponds with size.

 

It's just that leakage is messing more and more with this.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

 

 

And as they get smaller, there is more leakage.

And when you change the gate design, doping, routing, path prediction, etc etc etc then there are dozens of other variables that are changing the efficiency and power consumption.

 

So no, just using a smaller process size means nothing.

The efficiency depends on pretty much everything else in the processor design.