60 billion is obviously a metric ton, but 10 billion is not that ridiculous for an SoC to clear; there are snapdragons at higher transistor counts. The AMD 5950X clears 19 billion, and it is just a CPU with no GPU or integrated RAM. I’ve got to guess the M1 transistor count is inflated a fair bit by RAM.
I suppose it’s not likely we’ll know the actual price of the M1, but it would suffice to say it’s probably a fair bit less than the full laptop.
Since the M1 is 120 mm2 and a 300mm wafer is about 70695 mm2, you could theoretically fit 589 M1 chips on a wafer.
Subtract the chips lost at the edge and other flaws, you might be able to get 500 M1 off a wafer? (I know nothing about what would be a reasonable yield but I'm pretty sure a chip won't work if part of it is missing)
Anyways, that would be $17000/500, or $34 per M1 chip - based just on area and ignoring other processing costs.
If we go with a defect density of 0.07, that's 94 good dies and 32 harvest dies. At 0.08, it's 90 and 36 respectively.
If we put that at 120 dies per wafer and $17,000 per wafer, that's just $141 per chip. That's probably WAAAYY less than they are paying for the i9 chips in their 2019 Macbook Pros.
For comparison, AMD's 6900 GPU die is 519mm^2 and Nvidia's 3080 is 628mm^2. Both are massively more expensive to produce.
I suppose it’s not likely we’ll know the actual price of the M1, but it would suffice to say it’s probably a fair bit less than the full laptop.