You’ve probably seen the term ‘nanometers’ before. But what are they actually? And what role do they play in the development of smartphones? After reading our explanation, nanometers no longer have any secrets for you!
Explanation: this is what you need to know about nanometers
Anyone who bought a brand new Samsung Galaxy S5 in 2014 had a super-fast smartphone in their hands for that time. It ran on a Snapdragon 801 chip, an advanced processor with the addition ’28nm’ behind it. 28nm stands for 28 nanometers, which refers to the manufacturing process used to produce semiconductor chips.
We are now ten years further. The OnePlus 12 runs on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, which has the addition ‘4nm’. You guessed it: 4 nanometers. But what does that actually mean? And what does it say about the development that smartphones have undergone?
You may have already understood that nanometers are a measure of length, just like centimeters and millimeters. However, nanometers are much smaller and are used to represent an atomic scale.
There are 10 million (!) nanometers in one centimeter. That’s almost unimaginable, so here are a few comparisons: A sheet of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick. Perhaps even better: your fingernails grow by one nanometer second.
Importance for smartphones
Now you may be thinking: nice, but what exactly does that have to do with smartphones? A lot. For our explanation of nanometers, it is important to know that processors in our telephones consist of an enormous number of transistors. These are electronic switches that allow or block current. They ensure that that small device in your pocket has a lot of computing power.
The more transistors, the more powerful the chip. The Snapdragon 801 from the Samsung Galaxy S5 had one billion transistors. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 from the Samsung Galaxy S23 has no less than 16 billion. However, the chip itself has not increased in size.
Nanometers, simply put, refer to the size of the transistors on a chip. The smaller you can make them, the more you can fit on the chip and the faster it is. This has other advantages: the more transistors there are next to each other, the smaller the distance between them. The current does not have to travel as long from one transistor to the other. This ensures that a chip with many transistors is, in theory, more energy efficient.
When Qualcomm, the manufacturer of Snapdragon chips, announces a new processor, they often explain the benefits as follows: this new chip performs 20 percent better and is 10 percent more economical than our previous one.
High costs
In ten years, the number of transistors on smartphone chips has grown enormously. You can probably imagine that it is very difficult to produce 4nm or even 3nm chips (like Apple’s A18). There are only a few companies in the world that have the knowledge and capabilities to make these processors.
High-end chips are therefore becoming increasingly expensive. The upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, which will be included in the OnePlus 13, is rumored to cost $240 each. That is 20 percent more than its predecessor, which we will probably see in the price of smartphones that use this chip.
The costs (and performance) of a chip depend on more factors than just the number of nanometers, but we do not want to make this explanation even more complicated than it already is. In short, the price of technology decreases as it becomes more common and therefore more accessible.
For example, the Samsung Galaxy A55 uses a 6nm chip. While a few years ago these were reserved for high-end smartphones, we now find it in a device that you can purchase for €339.
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Source: www.androidplanet.nl
