"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.
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node
"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."