Citation?

(Not intended as a snipe. I honestly just don't know where to look for that kinda info.)

Wikichip is my go to (which is down right now for me unfortunately). It’s important to look at the latest data because Intel’s internal nodes real specs have not met the stated expectations recently

I'm not refuting the statement, only pointing out that density is not the only factor.

Unfortunately, these numbers are arbitrary and companies are guessing what performs about like what based on numerous factors. Often wrongly - Samsung's equivalents were so bad Qualcomm pretty much abandoned them, and for good reason. Anyone who used an Exynos or SD888 understands why.

I feel like we should have landed on a better tracking system now, like perf/watt, but here we are.

It's equally likely Intel realized it performed as well as Samsung/TSMC "7". Which is the whole issue, we'll never really know.

IIRC it was the other way around.

That was before Intel renamed their process nodes. They went from being 1 node more dense to being 1 node less dense with their new naming scheme. You need Intel 4 to match TSMC 5nm.