> Today, the node names are little more than marketing terms. 'The node designation is becoming more misleading and meaningless," said Samuel Wang, an analyst at Gartner. "For example, at 5nm or 3nm, there is no single geometry that is actually 5nm or 3nm."

Why is this not considered misleading and regulated?

This is considered misleading. But why would it be regulated? Nobody buys a chip based on the advertised feature size. They buy on power use, MIPS, number of cores, and cost.

So what is 5nm or 3nm?

The process marketed as 5nm has roughly twice the density as the process marketed as 7nm and so on up and down the line; that's how they justify it.

How can they double the density without decreasing the feature size?

The feature side usually does decrease every generation; it's just that the feature size for, say, a "7nm" process is not exactly 7nm.

The power of recursive reasoning. Induction tells us that Intel's 10nm process probably wasn't 10nm features...

I am wildly speculating here, but maybe going 3rd dimension?

It has about the same meaning as the 5 or 3 in "core i5" or "core i3". It's all marketing.

It's still a marketing term that has nothing to do with specific feature sizes, but they do increase density from one node to another.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/5_nm_lithography_process

How are the numbers chosen if they don't correspond to any actual measurement?

Well, the old law was that density doubled with each node. Indeed, you can see that e.g. from TSMC7 to TSMC5, density roughly doubled, regardless what happened with minimum feature size.

Like the numbers in product names, only with the understanding that smaller is better.

It is an equivalent scale. Density is fine pitchm2 pitchtrack height. You scal node by an equivalent reduction.

It would be better to use logic density, but it is easier to use numbers we are used to.

They divide by sqrt(2) and round to an integer.

The numbers are a factor of the square root of 2 since that reduces area by 2.

it speaks to this IN the article. Why is this low effort post at the top?

Because it’s mentally easier to vote and move on than read TFA and discover items to rage on

TSMC started using names like N7, N5 etc. recently.

nm is the new GHz/MHz.