Die shrinks are the key to lower prices and higher performance at semiconductor companies such as Samsung, Intel, TSMC, and SK Hynix, and fabless manufacturers such as AMD (including the former ATI), NVIDIA and MediaTek.
Intel, in particular, formerly focused on leveraging die shrinks to improve product performance at a regular cadence through its Tick-Tock model.
[2] Die shrinks are beneficial to end-users as shrinking a die reduces the current used by each transistor switching on or off in semiconductor devices while maintaining the same clock frequency of a chip, making a product with less power consumption (and thus less heat production), increased clock rate headroom, and lower prices.
In CPU fabrications, a die shrink always involves an advance to a lithographic node as defined by ITRS (see list).
The choice to perform die shrinks to either full nodes or half-nodes rests with the foundry and not the integrated circuit designer.