we need a fab competition as well. too many fabless like AMD, Apple...etc. deepened on TSMC

Intel is working on expanding their fab capacity and contracting it out like TSMC and Samsung.

ASML deserves mentioning as well.

Don't forget ZEISS

No.

Monopolies don't deserve credit.

They hold a monopoly of merit, many tried EUV and they succeeded in doing something that others were calling impossible even 5 years before they shipped it, not by shutting down competition but simply because no one else could.

The idea that ASML would somehow be more worthy of merit if Nikon/Canon also succeeded is weird.

Would the moon landing me more impressive if Russia and Japan also managed it?

Exactly correct. They're literally more deserving of credit because they've done something that to this day nobody else has been able to do.

Hopefully some serious competition and general normality will return to consumer discrete GPUs sometime soon, too.

I don't know about competition, but I think we'll see prices bottom out below MSRP before the 4000 level cards come out in the next few months.

Do you think so, because the crypto craze is back in the crypt?

We're already close to that point. Low to mid-end AMD cards are already available at / below MSRP (e.g. 6600XT), and nVidia cards no longer command a > 2x premium across the board.

At the height of the craze, I saw a five-year-old card, the GTX 1050 (not even Ti!), going for over 200.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/video-card/

From February: https://www.techradar.com/deals/looking-for-a-gpu-dont-buy-y...

Yep, the secondhand market is getting flooded.

GPU prices are already coming back to earth, thanks to both improved availability and the collapse of crypto mining.