"The end result is that while Intel’s cost per transistor is not decreasing as quickly as the area per transistor, the cost is still decreasing and significantl

"The end result is that while Intel’s cost per transistor is not decreasing as quickly as the area per transistor, the cost is still decreasing and significantly so." Maybe... The problem is, is Intel saying this as (honest) engineers or as (somewhat less honest) business people? Every IP business has enormous flexibility in how it defines costs and where it places them. nV's complaint reflects the cost it pays, which ultimately reflects some sort of aggregated cost for TSMC over not just per-wafer manufacturing costs, but the costs of R&D, of equipment, of financing, of various salaries, etc etc. Intel, in a graph like this, has the flexibility to define basically whatever it likes as "$/transistor". On the one hand, it could be an honest reckoning (basically the TSMC price), but on the other, it could be a bare "cost of materials and processing", omitting everything from capital expenditures to prior R&D.