system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does high-end hardware cost significantly more to make?

I work with HPCs which use CPUs with core counts significantly higher than consumer hardware. One of these systems uses AMD Zen2 7742s with 64 cores per CPU, which apparently has a recommended price of over $10k. On a per-core basis, this is substantially more than consumer CPUs, even high-end consumer CPUs. 

My question is, to what extent does this increased price reflect the manufacturing/R&D costs associated with fitting so many cores (and associated caches etc.) on one chip, versus just being markup for the high performance computing market?
gpt
Of course, some factories use expensive processes, some use cheap processes, and thus their CPUs will be more expensive or cheaper to make in general. But not within the same Factory (Fab line). It costs exactly the same to make the different CPU models there. The issue is yield. Just like diamond mining. An exensive diamond costs the same to mine as a cheap diamond.

Let me give an example. One 12 inch wafer makes 500 chips. 500 random flaws will be on the wafer, distributed at random. They slice the wafer up into 500 CPUs. So, some chips have 3 flaws, some chips have 0. The ones with 3 flaws across 3 cores will have those cores disabled in firmware and be sold as 2-5 core CPUs for $100. The ones with 1 flaw will be sold as 7 core CPUs for $500 each. The ones with 0 flaws will be sold as 8 core CPUs for $1000 each. They will then be tested for clocking. The ones that perform perfectly at 3.5 GHz get sold for $2000. The ones that only perform perfectly up to 2 GHz get sold as a discount line like Celeron.

So, it costs the exact same to \~make\~ the CPU, but they can only charge what people are willing to pay for each ones flawlessness.