When a working chip is crippled, that's a destruction of economic value. It may be offset in the long run by helping sustain Moore's Law, but that claim is very much in need of evidence. You have to actually consider what the computer market would look like if we could now buy the flagship CPU from 3-4 years ago for little more than the marginal cost on a mature process. That level of performance is good enough for most users, and could be available for ARM kind of prices. Imagine if the Raspberry Pi were twice the price but powerful enough to be your primary machine.
consider what the computer market would look like if we could now buy the flagship CPU from 3-4 years ago for little more than the marginal cost on a mature process.
If that was what the market wanted, don't you think that is what the market would get? I think the trouble is you are thinking "the marginal cost on a mature process" would be a few dollars.
You're right, the silicon would be a few dollars- but after testing and packaging and all that jazz, I believe most mainstream high performance desktop CPUs have a marginal cost of around $30. (Why not cheaper, like a 10MHz ARM chip? Package is expensive, due to cooling needs and pins for power & DRAM interface) So, perhaps you bring it to market for $40.
This chip you're selling probably performs like a mid-range part in today terms, in the $100-150 range. But when you consider TCO due to power draw and cooling, the numbers start to get closer.
I haven't carefully laid this out on paper or anything, but point being, if such a chip would sell so well, why is nobody doing it?
It becomes much clearer if you increase the contrast by comparing today's parts to those from a decade ago. The clocks are similar, but the performance has come a long ways due to improvements in IPC, multicore, updates to the memory interface, etc.
