Rival Chip Makers Brag About Having the Tiniest Products, but Who Can Tell?

But the battle to be the top small-fry has led to big confusion. Chips carry a number tied to the size of its transistors, and, for years, it was believed that the lower the number, the better the chip. Now, everyone is sort of making up their own standards.

When

Samsung

Electronics Co. recently started mass production of what it called the industry’s first 3-nanometer chip, company executives celebrated the moment by holding up three fingers. But ask chief rivals Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and

Intel Corp.

, and they would likely suggest the South Koreans hold up another finger, if not more.

“Please,” said

Jui-Lin Yang,

a consulting director at a Taiwanese research center with close ties to

TSMC,

“do not focus on the number three.”

Meanwhile, it isn’t clear if Samsung’s 3-nanometer chip outperforms the 4-nanometer chip from TSMC, based on the numeric claim alone, according to

Willy Shih,

a professor at Harvard Business School. Such factors as computing performance and power consumption would need to be compared, he said.

“The triumph of marketing hype,” he said of the industry’s nanometer labels. “Three is better than four.”

Samsung declined to comment about comparisons with TSMC products. The company said its latest chip had improved from prior offerings that used the older 5-nanometer process technology.

The semiconductor fibs echo marketing gimmicks in other industries, such as the variation in modern clothing sizes that make room for men with 34-inch waists, for instance, to fit into pants marked as “32.” In women’s clothes, today’s size 8 might be yesterday’s size 16.

The semiconductor industry used to band together to create common measuring definitions. For decades, they marched in step with Moore’s Law, the 1965 prediction that the number of transistors packed onto a chip would double every year (later amended to roughly every two years). Breakthroughs in miniaturization, known as nodes, helped shrink refrigerator-size computers to laptops, smartphones and wristwatches.

Complicating matters further, the number of companies pursuing cutting-edge chip production has shrunk over the decades from dozens to three: TSMC, Samsung and Intel.

That has added incentives to stand out in the market, even if the companies have, literally, very little to work with. The most advanced semiconductors have shrunk a chip’s circuitry to the size of a few atoms.

Chip makers mark their tech prowess in this Lilliputian world by the nanometer, a billionth of a meter. This marquee number refers to the length of a key component of transistors—called a gate—that regulates the flow of electricity. Smaller gates translate to smaller transistors, and the smaller the transistor, the more of them that fit onto a single chip.

As the nanometer numbers head closer to toward zero, sizing them up has become increasingly lawless. The nanometer nomenclature is now a better measure of how far companies are willing to stretch the truth.

Intel, having fallen behind TSMC and Samsung in tech advances, rebranded its entire high-end chip library last year. The 10-nanometer chip became an “Intel 7.” Chief Executive

Pat Gelsinger

acknowledged at the time that such industry labels, including Intel’s, “no longer refer to any specific measurement.”

The chip world saw a rare nanometer showdown in 2015, which helped deflate the value of the number labels.

Apple Inc.,

for its iPhone 6S series, hired both TSMC and Samsung to make its “system-on-a-chip” component, essentially the brains of its smartphone.

Samsung provided Apple with 14-nanometer chips; TSMC supplied 16-nanometer ones. After the iPhone 6s was released, tech reviewers, testing performance side by side, concluded the TSMC-run iPhones performed slightly better, with less overheating and better battery performance. Apple currently uses TSMC exclusively for iPhone system-on-a-chip orders.

Such a high-profile chip-to-chip matchup “will unlikely ever happen again,” says

David Schor,

editor in chief of WikiChip, a semiconductor engineering website.

The duel bared the industry’s barely veiled secret, according to people familiar with the matter. Neither the TSMC nor Samsung chip matched its label. Both were roughly 30-nanometer chips in measurement, the people said.

“If they were in math class, I’d rap all their hands with a ruler,” says

David Kanter,

a semiconductor and computing expert, who has consulted for such chip makers as Intel and

Qualcomm Inc.

Some chip experts have suggested creating a new system, replacing nanometer numbers with other measures, such as performance, power reduction or cost. “The Node is Nonsense,” screamed a 2020 headline in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ trade magazine.

A proposed solution by

Philip Wong,

a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, has drawn some industry attention: the “LCM density metric,” named for its measure of logic, memory and connectivity.

“I admit,” he said, “it doesn’t roll off the tongue.”

In April 2020, the chairman of the IEEE International Roadmap for Devices and Systems urged chip makers to “return to reality.” He proposed replacing nanometers with a three-variable metric that charts chip features. Many others, including Intel’s former top scientist, have called for clearing up the “node naming mess.”

Yet in the chip world, the obsession with size still matters. Intel aims to close the gap with its rivals by releasing the “Intel 3” in 2024. Samsung and TSMC are eyeing the launch of 2-nanometer chips by 2025.

Write to Jiyoung Sohn at jiyoung.sohn@wsj.com and Yang Jie at jie.yang@wsj.com

But the battle to be the top small-fry has led to big confusion. Chips carry a number tied to the size of its transistors, and, for years, it was believed that the lower the number, the better the chip. Now, everyone is sort of making up their own standards.

When

Samsung

Electronics Co. recently started mass production of what it called the industry’s first 3-nanometer chip, company executives celebrated the moment by holding up three fingers. But ask chief rivals Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and

Intel Corp.

, and they would likely suggest the South Koreans hold up another finger, if not more.

“Please,” said

Jui-Lin Yang,

a consulting director at a Taiwanese research center with close ties to

TSMC,

“do not focus on the number three.”

Meanwhile, it isn’t clear if Samsung’s 3-nanometer chip outperforms the 4-nanometer chip from TSMC, based on the numeric claim alone, according to

Willy Shih,

a professor at Harvard Business School. Such factors as computing performance and power consumption would need to be compared, he said.

“The triumph of marketing hype,” he said of the industry’s nanometer labels. “Three is better than four.”

Samsung declined to comment about comparisons with TSMC products. The company said its latest chip had improved from prior offerings that used the older 5-nanometer process technology.

The semiconductor fibs echo marketing gimmicks in other industries, such as the variation in modern clothing sizes that make room for men with 34-inch waists, for instance, to fit into pants marked as “32.” In women’s clothes, today’s size 8 might be yesterday’s size 16.

The semiconductor industry used to band together to create common measuring definitions. For decades, they marched in step with Moore’s Law, the 1965 prediction that the number of transistors packed onto a chip would double every year (later amended to roughly every two years). Breakthroughs in miniaturization, known as nodes, helped shrink refrigerator-size computers to laptops, smartphones and wristwatches.

Complicating matters further, the number of companies pursuing cutting-edge chip production has shrunk over the decades from dozens to three: TSMC, Samsung and Intel.

That has added incentives to stand out in the market, even if the companies have, literally, very little to work with. The most advanced semiconductors have shrunk a chip’s circuitry to the size of a few atoms.

Chip makers mark their tech prowess in this Lilliputian world by the nanometer, a billionth of a meter. This marquee number refers to the length of a key component of transistors—called a gate—that regulates the flow of electricity. Smaller gates translate to smaller transistors, and the smaller the transistor, the more of them that fit onto a single chip.

As the nanometer numbers head closer to toward zero, sizing them up has become increasingly lawless. The nanometer nomenclature is now a better measure of how far companies are willing to stretch the truth.

Intel, having fallen behind TSMC and Samsung in tech advances, rebranded its entire high-end chip library last year. The 10-nanometer chip became an “Intel 7.” Chief Executive

Pat Gelsinger

acknowledged at the time that such industry labels, including Intel’s, “no longer refer to any specific measurement.”

The chip world saw a rare nanometer showdown in 2015, which helped deflate the value of the number labels.

Apple Inc.,

for its iPhone 6S series, hired both TSMC and Samsung to make its “system-on-a-chip” component, essentially the brains of its smartphone.

Samsung provided Apple with 14-nanometer chips; TSMC supplied 16-nanometer ones. After the iPhone 6s was released, tech reviewers, testing performance side by side, concluded the TSMC-run iPhones performed slightly better, with less overheating and better battery performance. Apple currently uses TSMC exclusively for iPhone system-on-a-chip orders.

Such a high-profile chip-to-chip matchup “will unlikely ever happen again,” says

David Schor,

editor in chief of WikiChip, a semiconductor engineering website.

The duel bared the industry’s barely veiled secret, according to people familiar with the matter. Neither the TSMC nor Samsung chip matched its label. Both were roughly 30-nanometer chips in measurement, the people said.

“If they were in math class, I’d rap all their hands with a ruler,” says

David Kanter,

a semiconductor and computing expert, who has consulted for such chip makers as Intel and

Qualcomm Inc.

Some chip experts have suggested creating a new system, replacing nanometer numbers with other measures, such as performance, power reduction or cost. “The Node is Nonsense,” screamed a 2020 headline in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ trade magazine.

A proposed solution by

Philip Wong,

a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, has drawn some industry attention: the “LCM density metric,” named for its measure of logic, memory and connectivity.

“I admit,” he said, “it doesn’t roll off the tongue.”

In April 2020, the chairman of the IEEE International Roadmap for Devices and Systems urged chip makers to “return to reality.” He proposed replacing nanometers with a three-variable metric that charts chip features. Many others, including Intel’s former top scientist, have called for clearing up the “node naming mess.”

Yet in the chip world, the obsession with size still matters. Intel aims to close the gap with its rivals by releasing the “Intel 3” in 2024. Samsung and TSMC are eyeing the launch of 2-nanometer chips by 2025.

Write to Jiyoung Sohn at jiyoung.sohn@wsj.com and Yang Jie at jie.yang@wsj.com