Current process nodes are mostly 5nm, with 3nm getting rolled out. Atomic is ~0.1nm, which is x30 linear and x900 by area.
However, none of that is actually important when the thing people care about most right now is energy consumed per operation.
This metric dominates for anything battery powered for obvious reasons; less obvious to most is that it's also important for data centres where all the components need to be spread out so the air con can keep them from being damaged by their own heat.
I've noticed a few times where people have made unflattering comparisons between AI and cryptocurrency. One of the few that I would agree with is the power requirements are basically "as much as you can".
Because of that:
> double the performance a few times sure, but that's not a sustained improvement month upon month like we have in the past.
"Doubling a few times" is still huge, even if energy efficiency was perfectly tied to feature size.
But as I said before, the maximum limit for energy efficiency is in the order of a billion-fold, not the x900 limit in areal density, and even our own brains (which have the extra cost of being made of living cells that need to stay that way) are an existential proof it's possible to be tens of thousands of times more energy efficient.
However, none of that is actually important when the thing people care about most right now is energy consumed per operation.
This metric dominates for anything battery powered for obvious reasons; less obvious to most is that it's also important for data centres where all the components need to be spread out so the air con can keep them from being damaged by their own heat.
I've noticed a few times where people have made unflattering comparisons between AI and cryptocurrency. One of the few that I would agree with is the power requirements are basically "as much as you can".
Because of that:
> double the performance a few times sure, but that's not a sustained improvement month upon month like we have in the past.
"Doubling a few times" is still huge, even if energy efficiency was perfectly tied to feature size.
But as I said before, the maximum limit for energy efficiency is in the order of a billion-fold, not the x900 limit in areal density, and even our own brains (which have the extra cost of being made of living cells that need to stay that way) are an existential proof it's possible to be tens of thousands of times more energy efficient.