system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If microprocessor manufactures are able to get more transistors on a processor why do they make them smaller?

I understand that power and efficiency are factors they have to consider but if you're looking for all out performance why not make the processor bigger so that you can fit more transistors/cores/memory etc on it to make it faster?
gpt
three things: propagation time, power consumption and (to some extent) price.

The first is that the electrical signal only goes so fast, slightly less than that of the speed of light. This seems fast until you realize that in one clock cycle at 3GHz light only travels 10 centimeters. Chips are usually less than this but once they get larger it can be a significant problem.

Secondly, the capacitance and hence power consumption of a transistor gate decreases with size. lower power consumption is a bonus by itself but it also directly relates to speed because it means you can run it faster before it starts dissipating too much heat for you to remove practically.

Also, although the smaller sizes are expensive to develop, ultimately you can produce more chips on one wafer than you could before, bringing down the price in the long run (this is more relevant on less extreme cases, such as embedded microprocessors)

Also, just adding more cores/transistors/memory doesn't immediatly make the computer faster for most workloads, especially games, since the software cannot effectively make use of increased parallism. Most of the increased transistor count on modern chips goes towards better branch prediction, more instructions, and better caching instead of increasing clock speed, for which you in fact want *less* transistors.