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.
> 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.
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.