Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by AmericanChopper 1711 days ago
It doesn’t relate to any measurement of feature size. It’s just a frustratingly meaningless marketing term.
1 comments

Why do we keep using it?! It’s so unscientific that it embarrasses me that intelligent people even talk about it.
Fabs have been increasing transistor performance without shrinking the size much; for example, a 22 nm FinFET has similar performance to a 14 nm planar FET so feature sizes don't tell you as much as they used to. This led fabs to invent "effective" feature sizes to convey improvements in the process.
It’s basically like a version number now I suppose.