Do you have any sources for this? Where could one learn about this more carefully? I mean isn't this a major marketing fraud?
"Recent technology nodes such as 22 nm, 16 nm, 14 nm, and 10 nm refer purely to a specific generation of chips made in a particular technology. It does not correspond to any gate length or half pitch. Nevertheless, the name convention has stuck and it's what the leading foundries call their nodes"
..."At the 45 nm process, Intel reached a gate length of 25 nm on a traditional planar transistor. At that node the gate length scaling effectively stalled; any further scaling to the gate length would produce less desirable results. Following the 32 nm process node, while other aspects of the transistor shrunk, the gate length was actually increased"
"With the introduction of FinFET by Intel in their 22 nm process, the transistor density continued to increase all while the gate length remained more or less a constant."
I'll repeat it for you see you seem to keep missing it: transistor density continued to increase
This isn't marketing fraud because you aren't being sold transisters like you buy lumber at Home Depot.
Instead, you buy working chips with certain properties whose process has a name "10 nm" or "7 nm". Intel et. al. have rationalizations for why certain process nodes are named in certain ways; that's enough.
Funny you say that, because "two by fours" used to be 2" x 4”, but became progressively thinner as manufacturing processes improved.
That said I'm not sure why they don't sell it by it's actual size.
That must mean, that this marketing works to some degree. Therefore, it cannot be common knowledge amongst everyone who buys PC parts. Or it might be somewhat known but still affecting their shopping choices. If it was truly common knowledge, there would be no incentive to keep naming them this way?
There is much, much worse marketing out there to tackle first.