My current machine has like 10 billion (GPU + CPU)
I suppose it’s not likely we’ll know the actual price of the M1, but it would suffice to say it’s probably a fair bit less than the full laptop.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-reveale...
Since the M1 is 120 mm2 and a 300mm wafer is about 70695 mm2, you could theoretically fit 589 M1 chips on a wafer.
Subtract the chips lost at the edge and other flaws, you might be able to get 500 M1 off a wafer? (I know nothing about what would be a reasonable yield but I'm pretty sure a chip won't work if part of it is missing)
Anyways, that would be $17000/500, or $34 per M1 chip - based just on area and ignoring other processing costs.
TSMC has stated that N7 defect density was 0.09 a year ago or so. They have also since stated that N5 defect density was lower than N7.
Let's plug that in here https://caly-technologies.com/die-yield-calculator/
If we go with a defect density of 0.07, that's 94 good dies and 32 harvest dies. At 0.08, it's 90 and 36 respectively.
If we put that at 120 dies per wafer and $17,000 per wafer, that's just $141 per chip. That's probably WAAAYY less than they are paying for the i9 chips in their 2019 Macbook Pros.
For comparison, AMD's 6900 GPU die is 519mm^2 and Nvidia's 3080 is 628mm^2. Both are massively more expensive to produce.
And I agree - Apple making their own chips is sure looking good for their bottom line vs buying from Intel
I also don't need portability nor a fancy display because I use all external monitors and keyboard/mouse. Fan noise is irrelevant because I wear noise cancelling headphones.
For me, it's not worth spending the $2500 on a MacBook when I can get similar/better performance with a much cheaper upgrade.