Samsung to start mass producing 2nm silicon in 2025, first for mobile devices

Samsung Electronics will commence mass production of a 2-nanometer silicon manufacturing process in 2025, the chaebol announced on Wednesday at its annual Foundry Forum. The company claimed its 2nm process – dubbed SF2 – "has shown a 12 percent increase in performance, a 25 percent increase in power efficiency and a five …

[DS999]

More fake announcements from Samsung

They have announced 5nm and 3nm level processes in the past, and claim they are in mass production now but almost no one uses them. It is widely believed the yields are terrible and they have had no luck in making it economically viable.

Maybe they have everything figured out now with 2nm but I am wildly skeptical until I see some sort of announcement for a major contract win for high end chips for Qualcomm, NVidia, or AMD. If it continues to be used only for Samsung's SoCs (which they don't even use for most of their Galaxy line) I will mark this down as another fake announcement from Samsung.

[Pascal Monett]

2nm

And 1.4nm to come. Alledgedly.

How large is an atom already ? Because there will be a point where we have to stop this, right ?

To think that I started in computing with the 3 µm process. Nobody even thought about TDP ! Now chips are engraved a thousand times smaller, but they still consume anywhere from 50 to 200W.

It's a miracle we can cool them down enough.

[Groaning Ninny]

Re: 2nm

I'm guessing you're unaware the the 5/3/2nm is not directly related to any physical property, its marketing-speak to show a jump in density and power efficiency.

[katrinab]

Re: 2nm

A silicon atom is 0.21nm. You need more than one of them for a transistor.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: 2nm

> Now chips are engraved a thousand times smaller, but they still consume anywhere from 50 to 200W

Not as surprising as you think when one remembers that alongside- and due to- the shrinking of scale, the number of transistors will also have gone up by orders of magnitude in that same period.

[katrinab]

Re: 2nm

Generally speaking, the number of transistors has gone up more than the size of them has gone down. CPUs for example tend to be physically bigger now than they were in the 1980s, with a few exceptions like maybe the ones found in smart watches.

[DS999]

Re: 2nm

That's not really true. The first 386DX was 104 mm^2, and that's the size of many CPUs today. i.e. that's slightly larger than the typical SoC in iPhones (size varies a bit from year to year but is generally a bit under 100 mm^2) which contain a lot more than just one CPU core - they do graphics, all the functions found in the PC "chipset" back then plus stuff that required add on cards like graphics and functions that didn't exist then like 'AI' and image processing.

Sure many of the PC CPUs you can buy today are larger, but that's just because they offer more CPU/GPU cores than lower end versions which definitely are smaller than the 386's die size.

[katrinab]

Re: 2nm

OK, but the 386DX was Intel's flagship desktop CPU when it launched, with the SX as the low-cost option, so you should be comparing it with something like the 13900K.