Overclocker and youtuber der8auer has visited Tescan, a major manufacturer of electronic microscopy, having the opportunity to compare Intel's 14nm and TSMC's 7nm nodes head-to-head.Specifically, those used in an Intel Core i9-10900K and AMD Ryzen 9 3950X CPU, respectively.What would have been the investigations of him?Let's see it.The manufacturing process of semiconductors like our computer CPUs is based on trying to reduce the size of the transistors as much as possible, in order to maximize their density and efficiency.This poses great challenges for the so-called semiconductor 'foundries', who are the ones who design the manufacturing processes and manufacture them.An example of a foundry is Intel, which is more of a “full” semiconductor manufacturer, as it designs the product, the node, and manufactures it in its entirety.Its competitor in CPUs, AMD, is a so-called “fabless” manufacturer, that is, they design the product but it is manufactured by a foundry using one of their nodes.Well, Intel desktop processors have been manufactured under 14-nanometer nodes since 2015, although they have been improving with each generation (if I'm not mistaken, we're going for 14nm++++).while AMD started its Ryzen processors using the 14nm from the GlobalFoundries foundry, later moving to "12nm", and now using the 7nm from TSMC.Does AMD have a manufacturing process with transistors twice as dense as Intel?The first and most fundamental thing is to clarify that the nanometers of a processor have been, for years, something that is not standardized, each manufacturer calls their process as they see fit, 14nm does not mean that the length of the transistors is that, since there are many different measurements to take into account.So the nm practically only serve to indicate improvements or advances.The overclocker had to cut an Intel Core i9-10900K and an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X and its interior to get the images, in a process of extreme complexity and precision.To make the comparisons, they turned to the level 1 cache (L1), since it is the part that will be most similar between the two CPUs.If I had tried to compare in the nuclei, for example, the differences would be abysmal.As you can see, the similarities in size are evident, with a gate width of each transistor of 21.4nm in the case of TSMC and 24nm in the case of Intel.The point is that judging if one is better than another by this single measurement is stupid, realize that FinFet transistors are of great three-dimensional complexity, there is no single measurement that allows us to affirm the superiority of one over the other.Taking into account all that has been said, the conclusion we reach is that we cannot directly compare manufacturing nodes from different foundries.Even if we avoid talking about the "almost arbitrary" nanometers, it is dangerous to make comparisons like the density of transistors.For example, the 10nm used by Intel in laptops can house about 90 million transistors per square millimeter, as can TSMC's 7nm.That does not imply that the nodes are equally good, since there is too much at stake: optimization of the process, type of transistor used, architecture of the chips themselves, etc.We can, in any case, think in the form of an estimate or talk about the most specific cases: for example, no one would deny that it is more than proven that Intel's 14nm is much more capable than the 14nm or 12nm that AMD uses with GlobalFoundries in CPUs Previous Ryzens.A very clear example of this "game of nanometers" is in the 2nd generation Ryzen, where the process they used was an improvement over the 14nm from GlobalFoundries initially called 14nm+, but later renamed to 12nm.The complexity of these processes is tremendous, and we only have two viable options: either we compare specific aspects between different foundries and taking into account differences in architecture, or we limit ourselves to comparing between the same foundry.In Professional Review you will find all the most interesting analyses, news and tutorials.Specialists in hardware, PC configurations, peripherals, software, smartphones and any technological product that we see interesting.Join our community!