Your Intel chips were probably specced out in mils (milli-inches). All the screws are various fractions of an inch. A surprising amount of "modern engineering" uses imperial still.
Actually, in most of the world we use pretty much just metric screws. It’s always bloody annoying to occasionally have to integrate some piece of equipment that we have to specially get in UNC or other imperial screws for.
As for Intel chips, while wafers used to be specified in inches, I beleive they are generally fabricated on 300mm diameter wafers now. All the die sizes I’ve seen doing some quick research appear to be in millimeters (could possibly be approximations of values in mils) but I doubt either millimeters or mils would be useful for actually laying out ASICs - I expect they are mostly using microns and/or nanometers.
PCB design is still mostly in mils in the US, but I’ve heard from colleagues who moved from there of some big companies starting to switch since it’s more convienent for working with China etc. to just use metric.
Yeah, it's a sad situation but one we should be working together to remedy. We all have to get behind and push, though -- it can't be an individual effort.
US automakers have pretty much switched over to metric fasteners for years. My 15-year-old Ford is all metric. They sell their cars all over the world.
It's not like the reason high speed rail doesn't work in the US is because we talk about speed in miles per hour.