Until recently, shrinking the process led to some obvious benefits. The chip got faster, cheaper, and more power-efficient. The last part is really the importan

Until recently, shrinking the process led to some obvious benefits. The chip got faster, cheaper, and more power-efficient. The last part is really the important one and it's why the big datacenter companies kept buying new chips from Intel year after year. That calculus (so-called Dennard scaling) has now broken down, which is why Intel has abandoned their tick-tock development model in favor of a model that doesn't solely rely on process shrinks in order to achieve better performance.