IBM's contributions to computing hardware and software are incalculable.

So many breakthroughs in hard drives, chips, transistor density, and other aspects of computing have come out of their labs.

Great to see them continuing to innovate.

But, yeah, usually they partner and license. Over the years, they've spun off more and more of their hardware businesses.

Everyday necessity. The gap between mm and m is too large, there are many things in daily life that are better expressed in cm. SI units must strike a balance between three factors: not having so many denominations nobody can remember them; not having so few denominations that using them adds too much wordiness to daily life (150mm or 0.15m are wordier than 15cm); and a degree of familiarity with the everyday units people used before metric, to smooth the transition and encourage adoption.

Answer that question and you'll get the whole impetus for logarithmic scales.

Useless fact I just learned from Wikipedia: Ångström/Angstrom (in Sweden of course we still use the original spelling) has its own UNICODE symbol, Angstrom sign: Å (U+212B) not to confuse with the Swedish letter Å (U+00C5). Looks slightly different in my browser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom

1 picometer = 0.001 nanometers, 0.01 angstrom

1 angstrom = 0.1 nanometers, 100 picometers

1 nanometer = 10 angstroms, 1000 picometers

Because 1 angstrom equals 10⁻¹⁰ meters and 1 picometer equals 10⁻¹² meters, the relationship is:

1 Å = 100 pm. 1 pm = 0.01 Å.

I really can't see where the 0.7nm is coming from. The white line looks like it's just an edge of a feature that is "15 rows of silicon atoms", which by some quick arithmetic on Wolfram Alpha has to be AT LEAST ~1.6nm, and the way the rows of atoms appear to be packed in that image and by the provided scale, it seems to be significantly more. Using the white line as a meaningful measurement seems to me to be more misleading than any other interpretation here.

> Continuing the well established trend of making bold claims about physical dimensions that have nothing to do with any of the structures in the chip, and the name scales better than the tech.

We care about PPA (power, performance, area) and not how large or not-large features actually are. Comparing gate lengths between a 1980s planar transistor and a 2010s 3D FinFET or GAA transistor is obviously nonsense, the relatively aligned node names of the industry actually do make sense as a shortcut here.

It's been decades since published node sizes had any connection to actual feature size. Sadly this is just how it works in the semiconductor industry now.

As can be seen from the photos, the features are much bigger than 5 nm.

For silicon, the gate length of a FET has a lower limit somewhere between 10 nm and 15 nm.

The current CMOS manufacturing processes have not reached the limit yet. For making smaller transistors, a transition to other semiconductor materials will be necessary.

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.

Yes, and we're already there. We've been there for quite a while, in fact.

Once you make the gate of a transistor small/thin enough, quantum effects take over. Electrons will randomly teleport into and through the gate causing the transistor to conduct when it shouldn't. I don't have numbers to hand, but it's on the order of a few atoms wide. There's really nothing that can be done about it either, as far as we know. Electrons just aren't physical objects at this scale, you can't simply exclude them from any given volume of space. The electron wave function will simply just appear wherever it wants (within the electron probability cloud). The only way to stop it is to make your insulating junction thicker than the probability cloud.