I think what's happening is that initially a node is more expensive, because of consolidation of the market and supply/demand amongst all of the fabless customers until capacity fully comes up. Once we're back into steady state we see the traditional economics of $/transistor falling.

That sort of coincides with TSMC having competitive, close to leading edge nodes (so the 28nm timeframe) which would line up with the rumor. The information simply hasn't been updated over the timeframe of the node. Previous to that the cost of the node was pretty fixed as long as someone like ARM cared about, now there's a lot more economic effects from the increased buyer competition that heavily changes final cost over time.

I believe her talk was from late 2017, so 7nm would have been expensive.

At the same time, AFAIK Intel was doing quite well at 14nm finfet even then (likely better than any other foundry?), but that production capacity was not available to ARM, so I guess it didn't count.

Yeah exactly. I want to be clear, I've got a tremendous amount of respect for Sophie Wilson; she's a much better engineer and more connected to how the industry is going. Her statements simply require a lot more caveats than they are normally given. It's more about the much the changing position of ARM and TSMC in the market place than anything else.

> At the same time, AFAIK Intel was doing quite well at 14nm finfet even then (likely better than any other foundry?), but that production capacity was not available to ARM, so I guess it didn't count.

Yeah, and Intel was right in the middle of their biggest misstep. Intel 10nm was in risk production for Cannon Lake with awful yields and therefore a huge $/transistor. It got shipped anyway as one SKU in May of 2018 that didn't make financial sense (there's rumors that management bonuses were tied to that release), before being relegated to process improvements for years until just recently.

It would have been fair for her to extrapolate a trend there that actually ended up being more complex in hindsight.