cucaulay malkin:

transistors per mm2 is what matters afaik

That's why I said earlier to just rename the process nodes with their square mm number 😛

Ryu5uzaku:

Intel gets left behind even more... Hnngh it's no good for the general population because TSMC has limited capacity

It very much depends. If Intel hits its targets they will be on par with TSMC by 2025. I know Intel messed up 10nm terribly but I would not count them out. Intel is a freaking beast. From someone who has watched this for 25 years I can assure you Intel will be back on top at some point. My hope is they both leapfrog each other every couple years so competition continues. These next 2-3 years are going to be insane for GPU and CPU's. This is what I hope it stays like for the next decade ahead.

Denial:

Presumably they would just measure in picometers. It's not like it matters though, these are just marketing numbers, nothing about the process actually matches the NM they are suggesting. Which is probably why Intel just dropped it altogether. It's a meaningless name.

Technically, Intel is measuring in Angstrom beyond NM, which is just a factor of 10 on top, so 2nm = 20Å

tunejunky:

umm excuse me? you are quite wrong in your assumption about capacity, which has everything to do with yield. TSMC has the highest yields of any silicon fabricator. the difference in production @ node is profound between TSMC and Intel. furthermore, AMD's uArch leverages that yield with "chiplets" - which are higher yield yet. in the meantime the factories producing Raphael have spent the last two years pumping out iPhones. there are more iPhones sold each year than CPU's (by far) and there' never been a shortage of iPhones. if it was Intel we were talking about i'd be more worried because of their monolithic design (which equals lower yield). but even there TSMC has excess capacity.

Excess hasn't been there when clearly AMD didn't have enough capacity booked for GPUs and even CPUs for the current climate. Capacity and yield still wasn't enough to keep up with the demand. I am not saying they are small. But they are also the one with biggest amount of orders from many sources. It can lead to shortages.

Ryu5uzaku:

Intel gets left behind even more... Hnngh it's no good for the general population because TSMC has limited capacity

this has no impact on intel, intel could produce 1nm tomorrow but it still wouldn't be ready for high density chips, just like 3nm won't be for a while.

How much transistors there are on a given area doesn't necessary linearly translates to comparable performance, I would think. That said, better go by density than the current marketing bs.