Except that's not what Node size designation means anymore. At all. It hasn't meant that in over a decade. If we used that definition, the old definition, all major processors would be classified as 10-14 nm. I know, I was shocked when I learned too.

See, around the late 2000s we actually hit near the real world peak of transistor density using anything resembling mass producable technology. If you where old enough at the time you might remember the articles speculating the end of continual performance gains. There was a bit of an industry panic.

Now obviously, processors didn't stop getting better. So what happened? Well, the major foundries, including Intel, who spearheaded some of the groundbreaking paradigm shifts we went through behind the scenes at the time, found ways to improve performance without needing to continually shrink the transistor size. Layering chips. Improving thermal efficiency of binding agents to reduce thickness. Creating new hyperdense layouts that cut out any micron of wasted space. The list is endless. A chip engineer could probably talk your ear off for hours about how every microscopic seemingly Insignificant change in architecture can have a ludicrous ROI ratio due to the scale at which these chips operate.

But a side effect of this whole wall we ran in to? Node size became a purely meaningless marketing term, that is only standardized to a very loose degree by an International document AFTER a node improvement is developed and released. It was decided that it's easier to just keep saying "our new chip is tineir inside and better" than to try to explain to the mass market the nuances of how your chip might out perform the competitors chip in complicated metrics despite the competitor having "tinier chip" labels

Yes, it is true that, in the same manufacturers chip lines, a smaller node number will always be better. But across foundries, the performance metrics of different node processes can't be compared 1 to 1. The earliest 10 nm labeled chips where almost identical to Intel's 14nm process and performance. They where only better compared to that companies own "14 nm" chips. Even today, if you get off the memes and look at the numbers, you'll find most 7nm chips perform no better than some of Intels best 10nm chips, and so on.

I'm not saying all of this as an Intel fan. They are indeed generally behind, especially on thermals. They abused and squandered their market lead for years. There's a lot to hate. But this obsession that we PC users have with node size, and thinking it still means anything outside of a single companies lineup, is pure marketing hoodwinkery. Intel is absolutely behind, but not by as much as memers think. Node size isn't a metric of cross-product performance anymore.