alt Hacker News>These are not, in fact, physically sub 1 nm, despite the bombastic claims.
Why? What's their real size?
Not doubting you, just trying to understand and also trying to assess how exaggerated the marketing is.
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applfanboysbgon • today at 6:09 PM
They don't describe the exact physical size (that would rather defeat the point of the marketing), but you can see the photographs at the bottom have a scale measured in tens of nm.
At some point in the transistor scaling, the electrons started leaking across the gate, we've switched from 2D design to 3D structures to prevent that, so the actual physical gate pitch for like the TSMC 3nm is around 45 nm in distance.
Currently thrown around numbers mean the "equivalent performance/density" or something like that.