7nm or 10nm are purely marketing terms. According to Wikipedia, Samsungs and TSMCs "7nm" process is comparably to Intels 10nm. And their 10nm process is only slightly better than Intels 14nm process. Don't let marketing fool you. Samsung and TSMC aren't really ahead of Intel.

Can you specify the reference? If you're talking about feature sizes like fin height/pitch, tor pitch, IC... sort-of -- but only if you believe Intel's marketing material on what they are going to ship. Because they haven't shipped anything, they haven't had to commit to what that process _actually means_.

There are transistor densities for each of the manufacturer's processes here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11850/intel-displays-10nm-waf...

According to this, Samsung and TSMC are ahead of Intel, since these two have shipped their “10nm” chips which are ahead of Intel’s top-of-the-line shipped chips in transistor density. When/if Intel ships their 10nm chips, however, the leader position in transistor density would be regained by Intel (by around a factor of two!). Unless TSMC/Samsung manage to squeeze out something better than their current tech before then.

Intel's "10nm" has roughly twice the transistor density vs. Samsung/TSMC "10nm", so I wouldn't compare based on the advertised process names.

That's true, but only if Intel's _proposed_ 10nm specs matches what they ship. They haven't shipped anything, that's the problem.

Are Samsung and TSMC's 10nm equivalent to Intel's 10nm? I vaguely recall from studying semiconductors that different companies will call things the same when in fact one is substantially smaller and harder. No idea if that is the case here.

The 10nm moniker comes from ITRS (International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors). You may be thinking of e.g. memory technology versus CPUs versus FPGAs or something -- but in this case they're roughly comparable. It's true that the specifics are arguably less ambitious (fin height and pitch, gate pitch... are all tighter) -- but that's only if you compare Intel's marketing material to TSMC and Samsung's actually extant wafers :)

Right but samsung's current 10nm process only meets ITRS's 14nm guidelines... looking at tables it appears as though Samsung's 10nm is about the same (actually worse) as Intel's 14nm.

Doesn't 10nm mean different things to Intel, TSMC, and Samsung?