Angstra A1 — smaller than you can imagine
Angstra A1 · 1.4 nanometre class
Smaller thanyou can imagine.
The A1 puts 184 billion transistors on a sliver of silicon the size of a fingernail. Scroll, and we will take you down to every one of them. Well, nearly.
01 · One centimetre
Lift the lid.
Under a nickel-plated lid lie sixteen by fourteen millimetres of silicon: twenty-four CPU cores, an eighty-core GPU and a neural engine, each a different texture of light.
- Die
- 16 × 14 mm
- Transistors
- 184 bn
- Power
- 28–140 W
02 · One millimetre
One core,under the microscope.
A performance core is smaller than a grain of sand. Its cache is so regular it splits white light into colour, the way a compact disc does.
03 · Ten micrometres
Eighteen layersof copper.
Above the transistors runs a city of wire: wide power rails on top, a fine mesh at the bottom, ninety-two kilometres of it in every chip, joined by billions of vias.
- Metal layers
- 18
- Finest pitch
- 18 nm
- Wire per chip
- 92 km
04 · One hundred nanometres
A switch, wrappedon every side.
Gate-all-around: three ribbons of silicon, each five nanometres thick, wrapped in metal on all four sides. Charge the gate and electrons flow. That is one bit flipping, a few billion times a second.
- Gate pitch
- 45 nm
- Ribbon
- 5 nm
- Switching
- ≈ 0.4 ps
05 · A fifth of a nanometre
Then there areonly atoms.
The channel is a few dozen silicon atoms across. A single phosphorus atom in the lattice gives up an electron. Here the engineering stops being drawing and starts being physics.
07 · Back out
Ten orders ofmagnitude.
From one atom to the whole wafer, in one breath.
08 · Three hundred millimetres
Two hundredand fifty-nine.
Every A1 begins as one of 259 dies on a 300 mm wafer, printed with extreme ultraviolet light in Dresden, layer by layer: about a thousand steps over three months.
- Wafer
- 300 mm
- Whole dies
- 259
- Process steps
- ≈ 1,000
06 · The numbers
184 billion.
Fifty-six years after the first microprocessor, the count has doubled about every two years. The A1 is the next point on that line.
- Process
- A14 · 1.4 nm class
- Transistors
- 184 billion
- CPU
- 24 cores · 5.2 GHz
- GPU
- 80 cores · 61 TFLOPS
- Neural engine
- 96 TOPS
- Memory
- 512 GB/s · 192 GB
Angstra · Dresden · Austin · Hsinchu
Build on A1.
Engineering samples ship to qualified partners from the first quarter of 2027, with the full datasheet, reference board and simulation models.