>>712672139It's just not the coof, the moore's law is over.
From 1970 to 2010, we could just make the entire circuit of a chip smaller by improving the lens and making the mask bigger or with a higher resolution.
It was a constant $4000 per wafer, and every 18 months give or take, you could shove twice the number of components in the same die.
But we got to a point where the smaller shit like the tracks fail to work normally if you shrink em down. quantum tunneling makes electrons teleport around like crazy. we do abuse quantum tunneling to make flash memory, but in this case is undesirable and unavoidable.
What replaced it is what i call "the jensen's law". Instead of shrinking down EVERYTHING, we now re-design the components to use less space. the end result of this is that we both burn billions in research, and need more manufacturing steps to do a wafer, and as the end result, the best the manufacturing step, the more expensive is the wafer.
3nm is 18000$ according to this article:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmcs-wafer-pricing-now-usd18-000-for-a-3nm-wafer-increased-by-over-3x-in-10-years-analyst
It's what is being used on the PS5 pro, which is why it costs $700.