The  8180M cost $13.1K... I guess the ability to access 768 more GB of RAM is worth $3100

The actual cost of a product is not composed of only the fabrication costs. Because if you think, even the actual fabrication is very expensive (building fabs, buying optical machines, tuning everything, the electricity bill, etc), but before that you have the design/verification/validation/testing stages that take years to do and many people are involved and paid with money for it. So, yes, the product is expensive, the margin might be very big, but to push things this far they have invested a lot of money that they need to get back, in order to re-invest them in next generations of products. And...as shareholders, you want to earn some nice cash, right? You may want a yacht, a nice super-cars, maybe you have an "expensive" wife, don't know. It's all about the money in the end...

Wow, this is one expensive CPU!  Surely it wouldn't cost Intel this much to produce one CPU would it!?  I'm thinking that the profit margin on this CPU would be massive, and they're only charging so much for it because people/companies who need this kind of CPU can't get it anywhere else.  Thoughts?