CPUs are made up of billions of tiny transistors and logic gates that work to execute computer code to perform calculations.
Certainly all these transistors and gates consume processor power, and the smaller they are, the less energy they consume and therefore less heat, which is better process efficiency, so when we say 7nm or 10nm processors are measurements of these tiny transistors.
The “nm” symbol refers to the nanometer meter, a useful measure of the size of transistors involved in manufacturing, thus becoming a useful measure of how powerful CPUs are.
The 10nm technology is the new Intel manufacturing technology that will appear in the last quarter of 2019, while the 7nm technology is what TSMC and AMD processors rely on, as well as Apple's A12X processor.
So why is this important, especially for Intel!
Anyone who has studied a computer engineering discipline will learn about Moore's Law, an old law that states that the number of transistors on an electronic chip is doubling each year while cutting manufacturing costs in half will take a long time, but the law has slowed recently.
In the late 1990s and early 2000, transistors shrank to half their size every two years, resulting in tremendous improvements in the amount of processing, but then the size of transistors has become more complex and we have not seen Intel do this since 2014.
Thus this new technology 10 nano from Intel, came after a long time and may represent a short revival of Moore's Law.
Returning a little memory, Intel's slowing down of the size of the transistors allowed other companies to catch up, as the Apple's A12 processor was manufactured by TSMC with 7nm technology. Samsung was able to launch its own 10 nano processors, as well as several AMD processors TSMC 7nm technology.
All this provided an opportunity to compete with Intel in performance and break its monopoly on the market - at least until the release of the 10-nm Sunny Cove processor this year.
To separate more, what does nm actually mean!
CPUs are built with photolithography, which processes the components of the processor from transistors on a silicon chip. Each transistor is a process node and its small size is a measure of the etching technology.
The smaller the transistor means the less power consumption and therefore these transistors can do more calculations without increasing their temperature, which is usually the determining factor for the performance of the processor.
Also the small size of the transistor reduces costs and increases the density of transistors within the same chip, meaning more cores within the same processing chip.
Any 7nm technique has twice the number of nodes of operations (number of transistors) compared to the density of transistors in the 14 nano technique. This technology allowed a company like AMD to release 64-core processors instead of the previous 32-core processors.
It is important to note that although Intel is still running at 14nm so far while AMD will be launching 7nm processors very soon, this does not mean exactly that AMD processors are twice as fast, the size of the transistor is not the only standard, and on these small scales the numbers may not be accurate 100%.
These may be just marketing terms used. There is also a key role for the semiconductor drilling and manufacturing mechanism used. For example, the upcoming Intel 10nm processors this year are expected to compete with TSMC 7nm processors, although the numbers do not match.
Processors in phones will see the best improvements:
Shrinking the node size of the transistor not only means better performance, but also has other wonderful implications for desktop processors, laptops and smartphones.
With 7nm instead of 14nm, you can get 25% better performance with the same power, or the same performance with half the energy consumed.
This means longer battery life with the same performance and more powerful processors for smaller devices by making a simple correlation between twice the reach of performance and the limits of energy spent.
As an example, Apple's A12X chips have crushed many of Intel's old chipsets, which are still cooled and packed inside a smartphone.These processors are already the first 7nm chips to hit the market.
