[brucethemoose2]

I am thinking about physical size.

The GTX 460 is a big GPU. 332mm^2, 256 bit bus.

The RTX 4060 is less than half the size with half the bus width.

I know there are other factors, like silicon getting more expensive in general and L2 cache getting bigger, but still, the 4060 corresponds to a much "lower end" GPU in Nvidia's lineup of GPU dies.

[zamadatix]

If what matter about was physical metal area per dollar I'll be glad to sell you a hand wound 1kb of RAM for $20,000 then. It's absolutely massive in comparison to 64 GB DDR5 sticks so seems to deserve a premium as well eh? Heck if someone offered me a CPU that performed twice as well at the same price and used half the die are you going to tell them it's scrawny and poor value for performance simply because that CPU isn't as "beefy"?

The real metric for sizing silicon is transistors per dollar, not area used. Area is only used in how the fab will price a specific process and cannot be compared between process generations. I.e. it's as one factor in the overall price of among the current generation. If a billion comes out to 70 mm^2 or 700 mm^2 for the same price what difference does it make to the consumer, especially when the denser process will run the same given less power? The hard part about making good chips is, after all, not using the largest amount of metal in them rather the amount of logic and relative performance of said logic vs other implementations. Ultimately this leads to perf/dollar.