Yeah, since about 14nm the nanometer number has become kind of like CPU speed (mhz/ghz) became in the early-mid 1990s and for the same reason. Long ago you cou

Yeah, since about 14nm the nanometer number has become kind of like CPU speed (mhz/ghz) became in the early-mid 1990s and for the same reason. Long ago you could say e.g. a 600mhz CPU was faster than a 500mhz CPU. Then things like instruction level parallelism and other significant optimizations started and you had lower-core-speed CPUs that would in practice be quite a bit faster than higher-core-speed CPUs. Today a 1.6ghz mobile chip is far faster than a 2.4ghz earlier generation Pentium-4 for example, at least for most workloads. My understanding is that chip fab processes have developed similar numbers of devils in details. It's not just about the smallest feature size but lots of other things like materials, transistor types, layout, power density, etc. I've heard that Intel's 14nm processes are comparable to other fabs' 10nm processes for instance. Still this 7nm node is better than what Intel is currently shipping.