> As someone else here said, fab nodes are more like Lego blocks than a printer’s dpi – moving a design to a new node means rebuilding it in terms of the new no

> As someone else here said, fab nodes are more like Lego blocks than a printer’s dpi – moving a design to a new node means rebuilding it in terms of the new node’s building blocks, not just “shrinking the design”. This is true but 'rebuilding' specifically refers to producing a new chip layout (i.e. the thing you send off to the fab to manufacture). This can be a lot of work but is all 'back-end' work. You begin with the RTL giving the logical/functional design of the chip and implementation engineers push it through synthesis, place and route etc to produce a physical chip layout. This is what you have to redo, you can just start with the exact same RTL. When you design that RTL with a particular node in mind you can likely achieve better performance/area but it's not essential to do so. Plus when you want to do the back-end work you need a fairly complete design to work from. So for instance Apple could be getting a back-end team to build a 3nm M2 now whilst the front end design team are busy working on the M3 (specifically targeted and optimized for 3nm).