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Samsung Chips Will Get Faster and Easier on Your Battery in 2020 (cnet.com)
Processor progress is harder to come by these days, but Samsung says it'll build chips next year that will give you a bit more battery life or a little more speed. From a report: Through improvements charted by Moore's Law, chip electronic components called transistors get steadily smaller. On Monday, Samsung said it's taken the next step along the Moore's Law path, shrinking a transistor measurement to 5 billionths of a meter -- 5nm -- from 7nm. To get some idea of just how teensy that is, about 2,000 would fit end to end across the width of a human hair. The new petite size means the Korean company will be able to add more electronic abilities to its chips. It also means the chips will get either a 10% speed boost or a 20% savings in power. The development could help not only Samsung, which builds the Exynos processor for its own phones, but also Qualcomm and other companies that rely on Samsung's foundry business to build their chips.
If yes, take all my money!
Thanks for explaining nanometers, that really makes this basic, boring and otherwise pointless Samsung advertisement worth reading. (/S)
The problem isn't the CPU. The problem is all the Apps that insist on running constantly in the background, using GPS and other tracking sensors to spy on you.
I have a Moto G4 and I couldn't figure out why the battery was only lasting 6-8 hours. One day I finally quit Facebook and uninstalled the Apps for Facebook and Messenger, and voila! Now I get 24+ hours of battery life easily.
Get app developers under control and you get battery usage under control.
Meanwhile Intel is still struggling at 14nm. They used to lead the market. What happened?
Okay
A human hair is 100k nanometers wide; that means 20k of these would fit across one, not 2k.
Currently i don't like samsung phone because of higher rates and low specs they should improve their chips, i mean processing time and all and even battery life. Most of the samsung mobile phone have Battery issue so that should be fixed from upcoming smartphones. Anyone great post thank you for uploading this.
5nm, of course, is just a tweak of the 7nm process- where only certain chip elements have the smaller size. The power and or clock improvements are real.
Samsung competes with TSMC, which has its 7mn+ process coming later this year to same effect.
The real story is not this nonsense, but the issue of EUV (use of ultra-violet wavelengths with masks) and possibly larger wafers. Both these techs have been delayed for a decade now, cos of fundamental issues. Intel has crashed and burnt over both, having now the WORST process tech amongst the giants.
EUV is currently used as little as possible, and only on layers where trad wavelengths can no longer be forced to give improvements. No fab has proven the feasibility of going full UV, even after 15 years of research in this area by the tool makers.
Current 7nm has two tweaks available for minor improvement- and this article talks of one of these tweaks. After both tweaks have been rolled out, a wholly new process is going to prove to be insanely expensive and difficult, and is probably FIVE to ten years out.
AMD's answer is CHIPLETS- lots of smaller chips sitting on the same substrate- so a 'chip' is improved by using more chiplets. AMD's new Zen2/Ryzen 3 release in a few months time is a chiplet design, where 4 chiplets (CPU or GPU clusters) can sit around the same I/O chiplet.
PS as process shrinks finally end (we don't know how many more we have left, but they will have exponentially longer gaps between each new process to come), there is another option. Circuit improvement. Current circuits are usually sub-optimal, being cheaply placed by very poor chip CAD software that is designed to make the chip design process EASY, not good or efficient.
By allowing far better CAD algorithms, of Human input from 1st class Human circuit designers, a current process could probably see a 2-5 times improvement in many areas. With a tweaked 7nm being around for maybe as long as 10+ years in the worst outcome, there is loads of opportunity for superior circuit design to provide significant improvements (the very reason Apple now designs its own chips).
The quoted manufacturing capability is no longer accurate. It is now artificial. Back in the day, a 65nm process was indicative of a manufacturing process that could create features with a minimum pitch of 65nm. Then people started to create FinFET transistors - a process that allows for denser transistors. But how to sell such a process? The answer is to call it a 0.6*65nm process -- when it is actually still a 65nm process. The idea is that the new FinFET transistors result in the same transistor density that would have been achieved with traditional transistors and a 0.6*65nm process.
So the quoted pitch is now an indicator of transistor density -- sort of. Marketing also has a say so one should not read too much into it. Smaller is better but only for the same fab. It is not a good metric for comparison between fabs.
NOTE: The 65nm and 0.6 numbers are just for this example. Actual values will differ. I believe 14nm parts use a 22nm process - but one should verify if you want exact numbers.
The consumer wants tablet sized phones is a lie. Phones got bigger because there is no space for a battery that can keep alive a modern processor for a day.
From TFS: "shrinking a transistor measurement to ... 5 nm -- from 7nm."
These node names have long lost their correspondence to actual dimensions on a chip. For 7 nm (easier to find data on than 5 nm) the transistor density is 60-80 transistors per square m, about 120 nm for a square transistors.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
They show you precisely what wastes your battery.
You can then deinstall or reconfigure those apps, disable that hardware, or use an autostart manager, to disable certain services.
Beware though, as
1. some software will fall into an infinite loop, if an important service isn't available,
2. others will do that too, if you blocked them from accessing a server (e.g. with a host file / name server ad blocker that does not run a dummy server), and
3. If an app is killed or uninstalled while a wake lock is still registered, that wake lock will keep the phone active until it is fully rebooted!
4. If it's you baseband system that is buggy and hanging, you can't do shit about it, unless you have a known good version of Android from your phone's vendor.
5. You SIM card can be buggy, hang, and suck power TOO! An often overlooked fact.
I had predicted that next year that smartphones would fill an entire two car garage and require the power of 1000 suns to operate but guess what I was wrong!
Because reguar UV has already been used for a long time, no?
Also, my bet is on entirely new techiques, like photonic cirquits or other sub-atomic exotic materials.
Especially when combined with high-temperature superconductors.
I mean we are already in the range, where superconducting CPUs would be not cheap to run, but definitely feasible. Offering clock speeds and efficiencies (minus the cooling, of course) unfathomable before.
And from what I can tell, we already havd most photonic cirquit building blocks.
My main beef is with tiny keyboards and buttons. Much smaller than a human finger. And resulting cancers like autocorrect.
My second beef is the lack of information displayable at the same time.
And my third beef is phones so large that I can't hold one and type with the same hand, and that it does not fit in my damn pocket!
While being pointlessly thin.
I already buy thick rugged phones (Thanks Shenzen!), so breakage and battery life are no issues for me.
And I *hate* folding phones!
Flip phones already were annoying.
(Hell, screen unlock is retarded nowadays! Noka 5800's unlock was *perfect*! A small mecanical ridged slider on the side, that you pulled down and released. To lock or unlock. With a spring strong enough to never ever unlock accidentially, no matter you pocket's border or contents.)
What I want is all of that in one!
A big high-res viewport from a small device. And a big physical keyboard opening up on slide-unlock, faster than Android's current unlock.
And yes, that *is* possible.
... a human red blood cell is typically less than 10 um in diameter at the widest point.
In other words you could lay approximately 50 human red blood cells end-to-end along a single 5 nm transistor.
We're making great progress but don't close your eyes to vacuum tube technology or others which have the potential to bring us down another order of magnitude over the coming centuries.
Any self respecting geek knows that the 5nm process node name bears hardly any relation to transistor dimensions, or any other dimension. In fact, the spacing between metal traces in Samsung's so-called 5nm process is somewhere around 32nm, the public not really knowing for sure because Samsung has not yet released details of this node.
The real news is, the near-complete break with deep UV in favor of EUV. And as we all know (right?) EUV photolithography is still not ready for prime time. Last I heard, there is no good way to protect the photomask from being degraded by dust particles, in other words, the pellicle problem. Without this, production volume will be seriously degraded, yields will be low, and parts prohibitively expensive. This isn't the only open question about EUV, just the most glaringly obvious one. It's hard to know everything that goes on in the secret research labs of course, but I'm going to call BS on 2020 EUV high volume production. Sample parts, maybe.
7nm is going to be the reigning node for quite some time, I'm afraid.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.