What makes a gate-all-around transistor different?

A gate-all-around transistor wraps its gate completely around the channel on every side, giving it much tighter control over the flow of current than earlier designs and sharply reducing the current leakage that becomes a serious problem as transistors shrink to just a few atoms wide.

Removing the gate entirely would eliminate the transistor's ability to switch current on and off, which is the entire point of a transistor, so that description makes no sense as an advancement. Storing data without power describes non-volatile memory technology, a completely different concept from transistor gate geometry.

This design succeeds the FinFET transistor, which only touched the channel on three sides rather than all four, and chipmakers adopted GAA specifically because FinFET was running out of room to keep shrinking without leaking too much current to be useful.