Comment by keyringlight
3 months ago
Something I think contributes is that TSMC seem to be so good at making chips now, it seems like the defect rate must be low enough and they can produce huge chips in volume that a decade ago would be burning money. If you can do that, why bother making less lucrative smaller chips? Also while there's still benefits to shrinking an existing chip with a revised design, I'd guess we're into diminishing returns for what it offers a console whether the chip itself gets cheaper or lets them reduce the bill of parts in other ways.
This is also the first generation where prices have gone up IIRC.
The defect rate always drops like that. But usually the big lucrative chips move on to the next node, and instead they're filling up more nodes in parallel.
The main cure is to build more fabs but that's hard too and they're not in a rush to ruin their own margins by scaling up too fast in the face of an uncertain future.