> Even now, companies have a difficult choice when switching to 16nm - is it worth the cost and effort?

The alternative is to spread processing power over multiple cores and have programmers write code that takes advantage of that. We have a thirty year-long history of failures in that department. It has gone from "this is how we'll be writing code tomorrow" in the '80s to "this will FINALLY be a nail in the coffin of Moore's law, just wait and see" since the late 1990s.

The cost is worth it because there are a lot of high-profile industries depending on it, and there is no credible alternative yet. Until that alternative -- which will be hardware in nature, not software -- comes up, the current trend is all we have.