Except it is not, It is very much consumer marketing. Look at how all their Chip Vendors proudly market themselves as 7nm, or first to EUV.
Samsung Foundry started this whole thing, and TSMC CEO said during an investor conference their customers were asking for smaller nm because "another" foundry were using those numbers.
At the end of the day, all we have to know is that each full node has roughly 2x density improvement over previous node. And we still have 5nm, 3nm, 2nm, 1.4nm and 1nm coming up. Someday Moore's Law will indeed be dead, but for now at least we have another 5 - 6 years to go. I am happy I will get even more powerful GPU down the line.
Doesn't TSMC 16FF have the same feature size as 20?
That's not consumer marketing. That's still B2B, except the audience is management instead of engineering as assumed in the GP. TSMC's customers are not consumers. Set up costs run into the millions of dollars.
After the whole gigahertz wars, there aren't many consumers that are savvy enough to know that you want fewer nanometers.
edit: quote for clarity
TSMC's customers want to be able to say to consumers that it's some low number process node.
I would argue that the number itself is part of the product TSMC is selling.
Apple announced they were first to ship 7nm Chip in iPhone during an Apple event watched live by more than 50 millions people.
Huawei Announced their Soc being the first shipping EUV chip, most advanced SoC ....
Qualcomm announced their 5G Modem on latest 7nm to give industry leading performance......
None of these are B2B, they are directed to consumer, and these Vendors pushed TSMC for those numbers. TSMC delivered.
It’s “prosumer” marketing, for system builders who actually care about CPU bin numbers and serial numbers and stuff like that. There are both diy’ers and actual high-end PC vendors and system integrators in that category, and given they tend to spend more than the average consumer, probably can’t be ignored.
It is also marketing to investors. If your employee package includes some options or shares e.g. management, you want to pump your investor base, many of whom are not specialists in the sector.
That's how they came up with numbers like 7nm. It makes a lot of sense because the transistor designs keep changing and no matter what physical feature you measure an accurate number would become irrelevant with the next manufacturing process.
It might strictly be B2B for TMSC but it’s not B2B in general. Customers of TMSC want to market these silly designations and TMSC is more than willing to play along.