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>they're using "angstroms" I kinda hoped once they hit 1 "nanometer" they'd stop using these fake units of length.

As a chem major, we used Angstroms for measuring bond distances and other small lengths.

I don't think they were decrying the use of Angstroms, but rather the continued use of size-based terminology that has become decoupled from the actual size of any physical features.

Angstrom is a very real unit of measurement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angstrom

I think they meant fake as in "doesn't relate to any size of the transistors", as the gate/metal pitch sizes are e.g. 40 nm and 54 nm respectively for Intel's "7nm" node [0], even the fin pitch is 34 nm, so almost 5 times bigger than the marketing term would like to imply.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process#Process_nodes_and...

Ah, yeah. I can see that. So what does that refer to then, the smallest size of any feature of the transistor?

It does not refer to the physical size of any element or feature of the chips.

It's the marketing department's claim about what you'd have had to do to achieve "equivalent performance" using geometries (and probably other things) that are no longer used. Or to put it another way it's completely untethered from reality in every way.

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