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Exactly. WatsonX AI quantum angstroms for e-business.

The scale bar also got about 50% longer, which would imply a 3x zoom. That also seems about right based on the relative feature sizes. Same thing happened between the first and second image.

Transistor density in units of MTr/mm. (Million Transistors per square mm) is also used. The formula is

MTr/mm = 0.6×(NAND2 Tr Count)/(NAND2 Cell Area) + 0.4×(Scan Flip Flop Tr Count)/(Scan Flip Flop Cell Area)

I am not a chip designer, doesn't area matter way more than volume? Vertical space is basically free; it's horizontal space that is at a huge premium.

Density does directly scale with both of those in the form of more chips per die (=> lower cost) and smaller capacitance (=> less dynamic power dissipation).

If you want to reduce "effectiveness" of some process down to a single number, then density is far from the worst metric to pick.

Why is that all you care about? Stepping down a node gets you dramatically improved timing and design feasibility. The reduced density means you can pack the same design into less area. Your most challenging timing paths now have to traverse a shorter distance, and you can fit more of them relative to certain node-size invariant structures

isn't density a way to lower both the price and energy dissipation (so better heat management & energy efficiency)?

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All "density" means is that it's a quotient; I use spectral densities daily and that's "count per Hertz" which weirdly enough works out in normal units to be seconds.

Not all densities is mass per volume. eg. population density.

density is quantity per unit measure.

mass per volume is one example.

Density is this reply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#Transistor_de...

https://www.eejournal.com/article/no-more-nanometers/

Sometime around 2011 when Intel named their process node 22nm which the gate length was 26nm

Smart money would be on the first person who realized that the expertise required to understand the technical details had grown beyond that possessed by 51%+ of stock investing (trading?) population as weighted by transaction volume.

Should population density in cities also be measured in hab/km³ rather than hab/km²?

We are used to stacking people vertically in cities.

“TeraThread”

It's the equivalent performance of a 0.7 nm planar transistor. It's not about the feature size.

Node sizes have been "generations" for a long time. The number is just the previous number divided by sqrt(2), rounded in an arbitrary direction. Sqrt(2) because reducing each dimension by that number leads to double the density, and it's non-obvious enough to sound like a real measurement

I was saying not just “years”, but generations (approx two, straddling a full one) have passed since the naming reflected anything real.

In hindsight, I phrased that poorly.

Licensing is a substantial source of revenue, and their servers have very impressive (think Telum’s caching) innovations, even though they rely on third-parties for manufacturing the chips themselves.

They are also betting on quantum computing to become commercially relevant.

The hardware division has 80%+ margin and still makes the systems that process 75% of all financial transactions. Their processors for those systems are on par or better than any other, I don’t think that is a business at all. This cash cow is not going away any time soon and gives them the profits to make bets on the future of computing.

I don't know enough about their business to say, but I'm thrilled at even the idea that someone might actually value long-term success over quarterly earnings.

Isn't consulting one of the most high-margin areas in general?

The experiment to observe this behavior is pretty simple though (Young's double slit), and it was conducted more than 200 years ago. The explanation came much later but it's not like the phenomenon was hiding somewhere.

Reality is far, far stranger than we give it credit for. Makes you wonder what other completely bonkers secrets the universe has for us.

And frankly, the sheer insanity of quantum teleportation is why I don't buy any argument that faster than light travel is impossible. Not because "teleportation", but because every time we think we understand the rules of the universe, it laughs in our face. The universe is wacky beyond our wildest dreams.

I find it ridiculoua that we believe it is random probability instead of trying to find (and maybe later mitigate) the real sources of this randomness.

Aren't we reaching the point where there is no "solution" in terms of density and physical dimensions?

It's like the speed of light being a constant, or the Planck length being the smallest that can be subject to standard physics.

Quantum computing, which is a complete change in the actual physical model of computing, appears to be the only alternative.

You could make maybe ten transistors or so, but no more. That technique is quite literally pushing atoms one by one with a sharp needle. Not scalable, though maybe useful for some quantum computing platforms’ fabrication since we’re at early stages.

And you could write nice sci-fi about subatomic transistors, but forget making them in this reality.

It doesn’t, no. The most successful platform actually uses superconducting devices as large as millimeters, you can literally see them with the naked eye.

The issue with “just” photons and electrons is that you need something else to force them to behave like you want. And photons are large and non-interacting, really the opposite of what you want for computing. Great for communications of course.

It depends on the type of quantum computer. In some a physical qubit is a single atom, but then to make it reliable they need to add error correction resulting in logical qubits consisting of at least 100 or so physical qubits.

Another type of quantum computer uses qubits consisting of "quantum circuits" which are actually huge macroscopic constructions (> 1mm).

You can’t make smaller chips features with photonics. Visible light photons have a wavelength between 400 and 800 nm, much larger than current chip features. When you go to higher frequencies they get smaller, but they are really difficult to produce and control.

> You could, in principle, use photons and/or electrons. We got pretty damn close in the vacuum tube era, and photonic computing has been a popular research topic for a while

Wait, what? How does this work in principle for storage? You can store electrons but you're saying you can store photons too?

We do use electrons. That's what flows through transistors to do computations. Or, vaguely, the distribution of the electric field....

>We got pretty damn close in the vacuum tube era

Uh, what?

There's only so many fundamental interactions in the Universe. Computing requires you to be able to distinguish two states and our current methodology is built around some sort of black box three input machine that can output either state, a switch.

That switch is the part that cannot be scaled down infinitely. The reality we are familiar with doesn't exist at atomic scales. "Things" don't even have properly defined boundaries at a certain level, and thermal noise is a huge issue.

IMO a much more direct limiter of our current computing capability is lack of manufacturing ability, and heat. We were lucky that transistors were so amenable to lithography as a concept, that they work so well in 2D and as a surface feature, as that is what drove our advances the past 100 years and enabled computing to be such a normal thing. The combination of a "Solid state" effect, the electric force having very convenient properties, and lithography being so amenable to scaling things in various directions is how we got here.

But lithography doesn't scale into 3D. We've been hacking around that by doing more layers but that scales awfully, has very strict limitations, and makes the heat problem infinitely worse, to the point of making it impossible to work around.

If we could assemble things atom by atom exactly how we want, we could vastly improve our theory and practice, and build really intricate processor chunks with effective cooling channels or something, and computing would scale so much more. Maybe. Maybe some other problem would suddenly start dominating in that world.

Biology literally is nanotechnology, but it takes massive tradeoffs in exchange. It might never be possible to manufacture, at scale, stuff atom by atom. The Universe doesn't promise us infinite progress in technology. Quite the opposite.

Credit to Alan Cox. I filed it away after he wrote it in a LKML message many years ago.

Don't worry about not grokking quantum computing stuff, neither do any of the people who invest in it as well as many people who work on it.

1. The OP has nothing to do with quantum computers.

2. Quantum computing deals in coherent quantum states: associated with N qubits there are 2^N complex amplitudes. You can measure by sampling the square-magnitude of the complex amplitude which turns it into a Probability Distribution. Quantum computing "gates" cause interference in the complex amplitude of entangled qubits cancelling out incorrect results, such that if you maintain coherence for long enough and sample the final state and measure the probability distribution, you get a computationally useful result. The key challenge in quantum computing is extending the coherence time of a larger and larger number of qubits, which is why you hear so much about quantum error correction. Recent results from Google showed a scaling law for "surface codes" using multiple qubits to create an error-corrected topological qubit with extended lifetime. There is no telling how far this scaling law will go, but as long as Gil Kalai is in the next room, it is unlikely there will be actual useful quantum computation for a while.

which beloved FOSS were funded by IBM?

That's not what I meant. IBM published some scientific papers which explain the details. If you don't have the background to understand the papers and you don't trust the marketing that still doesn't justify rhetorically flipping the table.

More reason to frame it correctly, like "IBM debuts another 5 nanometer chip technology, selling it as sub nanometer chip technology"

> IBM no longer owns any fabs

Per IBM: "IBM Research at Albany [...] includes more than 100,000 square feet of semiconductor fabrication space"

I guess that is technically a R&D fab not a production one, but they definitely have in house fabrication capability

Looks like that's deprecated. From the next sentence:

However, version 5 of the standard already deprecates that code point and has it normalized into the code for the Swedish letter U+00C5 Å `latin capital letter a with ring above`

You had the right idea. Angstroms are not an SI unit. The SI units jump by three orders of magnitude at this scale: picometer, nanometer, micrometer, millimeter.

(In the same way that meter jumps three orders of magnitude to kilometer[1], or millions to billions to trillions, etc.)

[1] Technically there are intermediate SI units between meter and km but nobody uses them. There are not intermediate SI units between the tiny ones.