My understanding (from undergrad a while back) is that they already jimmy the numbers. It used to be that X nm meant that the gate width was X nm. Now it (usually) means that the smallest feature you can find is maybe X nm. Closer to a marketing term like '3G'.

Not that this isn't a real technical and industrial achievement, you just can't take the X nm at face value.

Maybe you are joking but nanometer is just a unit. We can easily go below 1 nm. For example 500 picometers. In fact that's exactly what the semiconductor industry did when they moved below 1 micrometer.

Intel have talked about future processes in terms of Angstroms (0.1µm), but for some time it's not been a real measure of size, just a marketing term. Intel has actually dropped the units and now calls their process nodes Intel 7, 4, 3. Apparently they plan to use 20A after that in reference to the Angstrom, although as before, not because they are actually measuring anything to that specific size.

Not possible, obviously.

But in a hypothetical scenario where process shrinking continued unabated by considerations such a particle size and uncertainty, a negated logarithmic scale would do for naming conventions.

    gen = offset + log(1/feature_size)

This might be the best for some time until they get to -1 or Windows style version numbers. Notice how all those hype headlines publish little or no technical info ? This looks more like P(entium)R(ate) numbers.

real numbers, dude... 0.9nm, 0.8nm, 0.6nm ...