[phire]

There isn't really a minimum production run for silicon chips, they do small test runs all the time to test new designs.

At least not from a practical perspective.

From an economic perspective, stopping after a single small run is just wasteful. The upfront design costs are so high, and the per wafer costs are so slow that you might as well make a lot extra. Maybe you can find a use for them, or sell them to someone else.

[Zenst]

Trident 2 (article says used 8 of these chips), and google says around 400-424 made, so easily would have soaked up 4000 of these CPUs with spares alone. So if anything, the production run seems light.

I read they had their own fab, so the minimum production run aspect would appear moot.