A report from Digitimes says wafers produced on TSMC's upcoming N3 family (N3E, N3P, N3X) cost US$20,000 per unit. The additional costs will almost certainly be passed on to end users, resulting in more expensive smartphones, graphics cards and CPUs. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Next-gen-electronics-could-be-a-lot-more-expensive-as-TSMC-s-3-nm-wafers-cost-US-20-000-apiece.669763.0.html
5nm currently costs $17k,
20k is below what I would expect for 3nm. From 5nm to 3nm, The increase in density (70%) is much higher compared to the increase in price.
Thank you, DantePierttyr. Your comment is more valuable than the news article itself, which somehow feels like a click bait.
An ordinary consumer needs to know the following from this news - there are about 400 chips on one such plate, i.e. the cost of one chip (even i9 level) is $50, not counting the costs for testing (operability in different classes), slicing and packaging. All together leads to about $100-120 maximum, when production is already debugged and the yield of suitable chips is more than 90%. And the profit begins to go when the manufacturer has managed to recapture the R&D and production costs of the new plant by overpricing at times. The only question is when this threshold of overestimation becomes already immoral. But in capitalism there is no such thing as a moral threshold for limiting prices, or rather cheating.
Tomshardware too writes "GPUs and SoCs to get more expensive" and also Logic Density N3 vs N5 is 1.6X. If they can produce 1.6X more GPU-s for only 1.25X total cost, that's opposite of "more expensive".
Of course I expect, this win is filled with extra logic to make better chips. But that's for chip designers to decide how expensive new chips will be.