I think process tech so far is the biggest factor to performance and efficiency but there are design benefits to be had as well. Just look at what bitfury accomplished only on 55nm node.
When ASIC saturation occurs and that difficulty curve levels out again we will see the lower process nodes showing their faces as miners will want a bigger piece of the pie always and the only way to get that is through efficiency gains.
yeah, I just wonder if there will be a market to make good on the multi million dollar investment for a 20nm maskset.
By the time difficulty levels out, mining profitability will be so marginal, I cant see a lot of demand even if electrical efficiency of a new chip is substantially better (but not orders of magnitude better).
More likely is that the mining will shift towards miners with very cheap/free electricity.
To put it differently, if 55nm asics had been in production for a longer time and the providers able to keep up with demand, allowing the market prices to approach production cost (which will happen inevitably), so that current difficulty would be 10-100x higher than it is today, Im not even sure there would have been a viable market for 28nm products.
Anyway, we may or may not see another shrink one day, but we will never again see the difficulty explosion thats about to happen. Fun times ahead
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