"one wafer, tons of SKUs" has been how the semiconductor industry has managed to keep their products evolving and so cheap for decades. Intel chips are largely

"one wafer, tons of SKUs" has been how the semiconductor industry has managed to keep their products evolving and so cheap for decades. Intel chips are largely all the same per generation and product line (low core count i3/5/7, high core count i7/i9, and Xeon). Whether it's an i3 or an i7 depends on how many manufacturing errors were on the surface of their monolithic chip - any core that doesn't pass the tests is disabled by activating some fuses. The chips with the fewest errors contain the most working cores and so on. The same holds for flash/SSD memory and RAM, where frequency/stability are used as the measure instead of errors on the surface of the chip. The key is that AMD's chiplets are about 80 mm^2 in size whereas a recent i7 is something like 130 mm^2. It doesn't sound that much smaller but when it comes to economies of scale, it makes a huge difference when, for example, a giant scratch takes out half a dozen chiplets instead of two or three full Intel processors. AMD trades performance - since the IO die that holds the chiplets is much bigger than an Intel CPU (300+ mm^2) the communication between chiplets is higher latency - for much better unit economics. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have chips like IBM z mainframe CPUs which are as big as 600 mm^2 many of which are just thrown out instead of getting binned so their yield is tiny and each chip costs tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars.