I disagree. Nothing in Intel's slide is misleading from what I can tell. Intel was comparing the actual transistor density between the two companies at the nodes specified. This is a perfectly valid comparison. TSMC's chart is the one that is somewhat misleading because they are convoluting the results with other metrics (i.e. improved layout) which does not actually represent what the Intel was showing. I don't blame TSMC because the chart does show them in a poor light but the comparison of actual transistor density is properly displayed in Intel's slide.
1. Five of the eight points are marked as "Forecast", even choosing words like "actual" or "data" is inappropriate for something like this. Not to mention we don't see a scale, not even a description for the Y axis, other than log scale. There is the old conundrum of whether logarithms should have units or not. I seem to remember I was taught to normalize units (off) before applying the logarithm function, so we can't have units as description, I guess. Well I had to infer that the Y-Axis denotes "area" from the slide title. But which area still remains vague, is it area to place a certain IC or is it just trivial Y = X² area of a square, that shrinks as you shorten the sides. I lean toward the latter.
2. What does the chart set out to show for the immediate future, with it's completely convoluted way to present data, It shows that 14nm is more dense than 16nm. Wow, guess what node also would be more dense than 16nm?
A. 15nm
B. 14nm
D. 13nm
E. 12nm
F. All of the above
3.Typically every node shrink is chosen such, that it basically halves the area. Twice as many transistors for the same area hence Moore's law and all that. This would read as
50% ahead in the chart presumably(?).
Intel's chart shows TSMC's [20] and [16] nodes at about the same hight. Why would TSMC go from 20 to 16ff if there is no area / no cheaper production to recoup the investments to be gained?
Also according to this graph the upcoming 14 nm process will only be 35% ahead of TSMCs 20 nm. Which should be good news for TSMC, since they both should arrive at the same time.