An historic day, and something many youngsters haven't witnessed, because of the painful slowdown in process tech.
When I got into the PC (33MHz 486 - the *first* decent x86 chip that finally added FPU support on the die), process tech was burning hot. CPUs had just gotten *passive* cooling. And with the 486, the rapidly improvement in every metric of the CPU was about to go crazy. Shrink and improve, shrink and improve, shrink and improve. No longer. Now every true shrink is a rare incredible event, as we grind our way to the last ever shrink.
AMD is going 7nm and 7nm (CPU and GPU). Way, way ahead of Intel (whose own process tech is now an official *bust*, but that hardly matters since it is now known their CPU architecture is utterly *broken* and should be used by no-one). Ahead of Nvidia, cos Nvidia is taking the greatest risk in its corporate history (good for them) and betting the farm on EUV at Samsung (Samsung has *never* beaten TSMC - but things change).
Zen is the first exciting thing to happen to CPUs since Intel's 'core' (but now we know core was only 'good' cos core was *broken* and had zero thread security).
Navi is the beginning of the culmination of AMD's work into fundamental efficiency in their GPUs, something Nvidia conquered with Pascal a few gens back. AMD is drawing at least level (and likely ahead for a moment, techwise, until Nvidia gets its 7nm) with Nvidia (tho actual performance depends on their die size, of course). But Navi is also revolutionising the new consoles.
Indeed Zen and Navi have biggest impact on consoles, since PC gamers could always power up via very high spends to compensate. Although on the PC side AMD is making better performance way more affordable, even if current AMD affordable maximal performance doesn't beat yesterday's mega expensive solutions from Intel (pre-mitigations) + Nvidia.
In other words 7nm is bringing the sea change other major shrinks brought in the early days on a far more frequent schedule.
And future shrinks? Don't hold your breath. Your lifetime may see only *two* more true shrinks.
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