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by wmf 3 hours ago
It's the equivalent performance of a 0.7 nm planar transistor. It's not about the feature size.
1 comments

A 0.7 nm planar transistor made of silicon has no performance, because a device so small cannot function as a transistor.

The intended meaning of "0.7 nm" is that if you compare the transistor density per area of a "0.7 nm" manufacturing process with that of a "350 nm" process (like used for some Pentium II CPUs, at a time when "350 nm" was a real length), the ratio between the transistor densities is (350 nm / 0.7 nm)^2 = 500^2 = 250,000.

Comparing with the number of transistors of a Pentium II, a 0.7 nm CPU should be able to contain about 5000 billion transistors. This is consistent with the fact that the latest 3 nm NVIDIA Rubin GPU has 336 billion transistors and a 0.7 nm circuit must have a density around 16 times greater than a 3 nm circuit.

However, for many of the modern node names used by some companies even this computation is not really true, because marketing may have chosen an arbitrary name that is smaller than for the last process of the main competitor.

For now, IBM has not provided any kind of information that could prove their claim that their new CMOS process has the transistor density corresponding to "0.7 nm" (i.e. 16 times greater than the TSMC "3 nm" CMOS process).