What do nanometers (nm) refer to when talking about microprocessors? Why is smaller better?

Question

I often hear about a new, smaller microprocessor that is, for example 5nm instead of 7nm.

In: Engineering

Answer 1

Basically this is the size of the “switches” inside the processor. The more of these you have the more calculations you can do and the faster you can get things done.

Smaller switches means more processing in the same amount of space.