This discussion brings to mind something Gordon Moore explained[1] about the economics of chip fabrication. According to this Intel co-founder it's all about s

This discussion brings to mind something Gordon Moore explained[1] about the economics of chip fabrication. According to this Intel co-founder it's all about selling silicon real-estate: What we end up doing is really selling real estate. We've sold area on the silicon wafer for about a billion dollars an acre, that order of magnitude, as long as I've been in the industry. Individual transistors used to sell for a few billion dollars an acre. The microprocessors today, too. Maybe DRAMs are something under a billion. So the cost of fabricating a wafer full of devices doesn't change much over time, but shrinking features means you get more devices for that cost. Notice the difference he points out between microprocessors and DRAM: all the costs involved with highly complex devices like CPUs ultimately still fall within the same order of magnitude as the cost of simple DRAM devices. The cost is some small number of "billions per acre" whether you're making the latest cutting edge circuit or just more arrays of bits. [1] https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/speeches/gem93097.htm https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/speeches/gem93097.ht...