The Moore's law argument does not apply to low performance embedded chips which are whatever the engineers want them to be, but must be exactly what the engineers wanted them to be. The chips themselves were often the same between different models of the product, but even though demand for them was a very predictable function of the number of products made, and stable over time (pursuant to the stability of demand for the product), everyone's inventory consisted of whatever was in the box that was being carried from the loading dock to the pick and place machine.

> Well only a decade ago Moore's law ensured that keeping any amount of stock on CPUs/GPU/memory would cost you a lot of money, as that would depreciate fast.

This clearly holded for PC components, but rather not for, say, microcontrollers for conservatively developed products with a much longer service life and/or duration of sell.

Consider, for example, a stock of microcontrollers for an industrial machinery that

* will be used for 20 years by the customers,

* will be sold for the next 10 years,

* after these 10 years, for the remaining lifetime of the machine, the customer will still be able to buy spare parts.