> The meaningful achievement is how many discrete electrical components are composed into a given area. Not some arbitrary dimension of some cherry picked subset of these components.
I disagree. The meaningful achievement is how power-efficient, fast, and cheap you can make a given chip. (Secondarily, how small and how durable wrt cosmic rays; but for most purposes these are not super important.)
If that follows as a result of many discrete electrical components being packed into a small area, great; but the latter isn't intrinsically interesting.
The issue with power efficiency, speed, and price is that it's even harder to measure than transistor density. Furthermore, I think metrics that measure the technological progress of the silicon manufacturing are a useful tool for enriching comparisons of chips. Yes, numbers like cache sizes (or transistor density) aren't what people ultimately need/want, they want speed, but it still helps them compare chips. Improvements of the underlying process alone could lead to improvements of power efficiency, speed, and price.
> Efficiency, performance and cost are strongly related to density. Price less so; that's a function of supply and demand.
They are related, of course, but the important stuff can be measured more directly by looking at how well programs work on a given computer. I think it's just a little odd to praise one cherry-picked, arbitrary metric for being less game-able than another cherry-picked, arbitrary metric. Especially when we have metrics to hand that are a lot closer to what real people care about in a computer. I certainly have never shopped for a CPU based on the number of transistors, but I have made purchasing decisions based on things like cinebench and passmark scores, which try to get at what ultimately matters to me (i.e. how many FPS a CPU will drive in the games I play).
That magazines, sites and fans started using density for bragging rights, just as they used to do with MHz, certainly isn’t fully the fault of manufacturers.
Manufacturers use “x nm”, yield (a metric correlated with price, but also completely uninteresting for consumers), etc. because they tell chip designers what they need to know.
They avoid benchmark scores because they bring the CPU design in the picture as a variable.
It's a story from a site that focuses on fabrication technology and the semiconductor market place. The topic is device density. This is of interest, even if it doesn't interest you.
I disagree. The meaningful achievement is how power-efficient, fast, and cheap you can make a given chip. (Secondarily, how small and how durable wrt cosmic rays; but for most purposes these are not super important.)
If that follows as a result of many discrete electrical components being packed into a small area, great; but the latter isn't intrinsically interesting.