It was also based on economic "laws" of a sort. One of the biggest reasons to keep pushing to smaller process nodes is that incremental costs went down, not ju

It was also based on economic "laws" of a sort. One of the biggest reasons to keep pushing to smaller process nodes is that incremental costs went down, not just due to increased density, but because all things being equal, a shrink of an existing design resulted in much higher yields (for example, 5 bits of dust on a wafer will kill a much smaller percentage of die with an equal number of transistors, since the smaller process node will have more die).