It’s not that big, it’s ~120 mm^2. You can go to intel or AMD and find 750 mm^2 chips...

Apple have 2 advantages here.

- They don’t play in the low-cost arena, people expect a Mac to be a bit more expensive, so they have a larger cost budget to work with

- They don’t have to make a profit on the CPU in particular, whereas Intel and AMD do.

Apple want a 38-40% margin on the whole shebang, and if it needs a more expensive chip, then that’s what’ll happen, maybe taking cost-savings from (2), and of necessary adding price because of (1).

I would be shocked if Platform Architecture at Apple didn’t already have 8, 16, and 32-core variants of the M series up and running, or at the very least in simulation. They’re coming, and the world will change. Again.