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> No one beyond chip nerds like myself ever really hear or care about node stepping...

Sadly not the case. There are two important, and probably more important constituancies.

First is analysts, market and financial analysts. I have spoken with some really good ones, some of whom came from their respective industries and some of whom didn't but nonetheless really knew their stuff. And I've known some who never really understood but grasped at things that looked scientifish and ran with it. Sadly this latter group outnumber the former group. Analysists cause stock prices to go up and down and often set the consensus that is adopted in the press.

And the second constituency is, at the end of the day, the one that matters: consumers: the people who spend money on the product. And most of them get their info from the consensus opinion as they can't possibly have expertise on everything you need to know (nobody can).

It's stupid that so much rides on this arcane technical question but in this case Intel is reaping the whirlwind it sowed: they put part of their highly technical product line right in front of the consumer in ads and stickers on the products. Now the consensus on the street, fair or not, is that they are behind the times.

True about analysts, but any who don't understand the node naming incongruence between Intel and TSMC/Samsung have no business opining on these companies, and as harsh as it is to say this, investors who blindly listen to them without doing a bit more vetting kind of get what they deserve.

> but any who don't understand ... have no business opining

Ha, have you spoken with any analysts? They are paid to express an opinion. So they do.

There are good ones and terrible ones. Some people listen only to the good ones and most people don’t know how to tell the difference.

If it's FUD then it's been going on for over a decade. Back when Intel was ahead, people would say things like "Intel is first to 32 nm and has a better process than other fabs. So TSMC/GloFo/etc. won't catch up until they hit 28 nm, at which point Intel will hit 22 nm."

But it makes little sense, Intel fabs were not even in competition with TSMC and GloFo, they don't sell their fab capacity.

Apple/Nvidia/AMD/etc buy fab capacity, they understand the differences on a node per node across the various providers. They then manufacture a semi conductor product that has many other factors beyond the process node which others buy, such as consumers/data centers/car manufacturer/etc. Knowing the processing node makes little sense in the buying decision of the latter.

The lines for evaluating the end product are even more blurry once we get into chiplet or big.LITTLE design, both of which mix processing nodes to a lesser or greater degree respectively. Once we actually get to products the overall package needs to be evaluated not the processing node.

But AMD compete with intel, and consumers might look at nm size when comparing mainstream processors to buy, because at one point it was a good indication of how recent the processor was, and thus how fast / power efficient / ...

Not that I'm not talking about educated consumers, which will look at other variables, but rather the consumers who will buy a computer and want the cutting edge, without knowing too much details.

But they really don't, if you jump on a LTT, gamers nexus, or any tech review it will be full of benchmarks both real and synthetic, the process now might be mentioned but it's hardly the main selling point.

Intel have been happily enjoying huge market share on 14nm for the better part of a decade after all.

These “other” variables do depend on process mode, so TSMC and Intel processes are in competition via the Performance/cost/energy-consumption of the chips they produce.

But the process now does not actually reflect what trade-offs the manufacturing is going to make in the architectural choices.

I really feel this is so relevant now only because Intel's 10nm has become such a black mark. Everyone talks about the problems and that's what might be bleeding through into the consumer conciousness.

> they don't sell their fab capacity.

There is a "fabless" division of Intel that uses their fab to do designs for third parties. You won't hear much about it because a) it's for relatively niche stuff and b) it's historically very uncompetitive in terms of IP offering and schedules. So nobody uses it. Every so often they try and re-invent it, a few years backs they were pitching the Altera aquistion as a benefit but so far it's remained uninteresting. Being able to offer capacity might change things for some prospective customers.

As an aside I think Intel have actually done phenomenal work to stretch their 14nm as far as they have. It's taken a significant amount of power draw to do it, but still a significant feat of semi conductor design imo.

Iterative designs for multiple generations with minimal IPC improvements across multiple sockets is "phenomenal work"?

With all of the processor flaw mitigations, we saw the Lake series effectively lose all of their gains, however slim, between each generation.

Rocket Lake, the newest, still gets a 2 to 16% performance hit (depending on task) with mitigations on.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=spectre-...

At this point, Intel is behind where they started with the Core line.

They stretched the app core clocks quite a bit. For sure they had a lot of historical performance lead they had to burn to stay relevant but I don't think it would have been easy to get 14nm as far as they have. It has definitely got very little to give going forward though.