alt Hacker News> It's a physical quantity per some unit of spatial measurement so the units still don't match up b/c in one case the transistors are stacked per volume & in the other case per area.
"Planar" and "3D" in this context refers to the shape of the transistors themselves. In a planar transistor the functional structure is spread out in the area, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MOSFET_functioning_body.s... while 3D transistors spread into the volume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multigate_device#/media/File:D...
However the active devices are still just one layer. This isn't like 3D NAND where you actually have transistors on top of each other. So the comparison only considers the area for both kinds of transistors.
In any case, I got the answer from the AI I was looking for & it makes sense. You can try to map the volumetric density to areal density but the mapping is not canonical so it doesn't say anything about the physical reality of actual transistor density since the reality is that it is a volumetric measure that gets fudged for marketing purposes.