The cost of more pins is linear in the number of pins, and the pins aren't the only component of the manufacturing cost, so a card with twice as many pins will have a manufacturing cost of significantly less than twice that of a card with half as many pins.

Cards with 16GB of VRAM exist for ~$300 retail.

Cards with 80GB of VRAM cost >$15,000 and customers pay that.

A card with 80GB of VRAM could be sold for <$1500 with five times the margin of the $300 card because the manufacturing cost is less than five times as much. <$1500 is unambiguously a smaller number than >$15,000. QED.

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doctorpangloss 2 days ago | parent [-]

> the manufacturing cost is less than five times as much

They don’t manufacture the RAM. This isn’t complicated. They make less margin (a percentage) in your scenario. And that’s what Wall Street cares about.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		They don't really manufacture anything. TSMC or Samsung make the chip and Samsung, Micron or Hynix make the RAM. Even Intel's GPUs are TSMC. Also, Wall St cares about profit, not margins. If you can move a billion units with a $100 margin, they're going to like you a lot better than if you move a million units with a $1000 margin.