And if one insists on comparing, Intel 10nm is kind of TSMC 7nm. However Intel only manages to make a few of their laptop parts with their 10nm, and with not great frequencies IIRC. So they are behind now.
Process isn’t everything, but they’re not just marketing. The process has a huge impact on the heat & power characteristics of the core, and also controls how much stuff you can stuff into a die.
The point he's making is that 10nm, 7nm, etc don't actually denote anything that lets you do an apples-to-apples comparison anymore. At this point, they're not measures the way they were in legacy process nodes.
They haven't been apple to apples in over 20 years. But being stuck on one feature size for more than 2-3 years is still a major roadblock to performance improvement.
"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."
"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."
It never stopped being true, but a lot of what makes a processor faster these days is smarter layout, better branch prediction, and better microcode. Process size matters, but it’s probably less important than it was in the 1990s.
Also, there's a difference between the minimum feature size that can be fabricated (mostly a lithography challenge), the minimum size of a reliable device that works well (e.g. with enough doping atoms in the channel) and the size and shape a specific transistor needs to be for its particular requirements.