Apple officially unveils M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max: 3 nanometer, Dynamic Caching GPU, more - eviltoast
  • Doubletwist@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It very much does matter. A large driver of pushing to smaller scale is to increase the amount of transistors and traces they can fit in a given space for reasons of both manufacturing and practical issues.

    If they tried to make a modern CPU using the manufacturing scale of yesteryear, they’d have to use multiple wafers to make a single chip.

    Can you imagine how big a modern CPU (7ish nm) design would end up if it were made using the same scale as even a Pentium Pro/Pentium 2 (300nm)?? They would be 42times larger!! Just try fitting one of those in a laptop. And that’s ignoring the timing issues you’d have with the traces being so long between sections of the CPU.