[dijit]

They're trying to market themselves as a closer number to the node width, they were annoyed that 14nm by Intels metrics was marketed as 10nm by TSMC.

Which I think is ironic as AMD has been more accurately reporting TDP (Intels measurement of that metric is their expected average, where AMDs is actually peak).

I think they're scared about what happens when we get passed nanometers, even though they're not claiming nanometers it's clear thats what they're trying to evoke, and they're assuming they can go smaller, so that's where the "A"s (meant to closely resemble "Angstrom" without actually saying it) come from.

[thunderbird120]

The 18A naming convention is as simple as not wanting to put a decimal point in their node name. Simple as that. It's not like the the "nanometer" node names actually mean anything at this point anyways. Neither TSMC N3 or Intel 3 have any dimension in their transistors which are 3nm. I would be very unsurpassed to see other foundries copy the convention, it's a lot cleaner.