The silicon costs are a very tiny portion of their cost of goods sold.
Electricity, water and even just plain packaging of the cpu will likely cost more than the difference in silicon use between 14 and 7 nm
Electricity, water and even just plain packaging of the cpu will likely cost more than the difference in silicon use between 14 and 7 nm
2. If the constraint on the number of packages you can sell is the number of chips you can produce, then the packaging cost of the chip is not so relevant (assuming packaging is not a constraint on production). If you can halve the chip area on the same production node, you can double production of packages, which can make a huge difference to profits (assuming Intel is a high margin business with high demand and that demand elasticity is in their favour etcetera).
Disclaimer: I am not in the industry, but what you say just seems wrong without even arguing that the cost of the silicon for Intel dominates packaging costs.
193i steppers are also dirt cheap, and most of their old fabs can also be modified for 14nm/10nm production, whereas EUV tools are 180 tonne behemoths that require overhead cranes and/or physical disassembly of the plant to move.