I admit I didn't understand much of that but enjoyed reading it none the less.
I wonder about the hardware selected for say a charger, is it maybe just that the power (CPU, memory) are just a factor of that being the most cost effective choice and the power (cpu, memory) are far more than a USB charger needs?
I'd guess at one point you simply can't buy anything cheaper than 10MHz?
I'm updating my laptop; it'd probably be fully sufficient to have just 16GB DDR4 (I have just 4GB right now, and it ain't that bad), but I can get a 32GB stick for only like 110 USD, so, I might as well go for 32GB to max out the slot and not have to worry about it later on. If the price for 32GB sticks was more like $500, I'd probably not bother (although it'd arguably still be a good investment in our profession here, it's just a little more hard to justify when you know the price will come down relatively soon, and you don't quite need that much RAM in the immediate future anyways).
That's kinda what I'm assuming. As a chip maker one chip that covers like X use cases might be more powerful than a lot of them need, but it covers all those use cases.
I guess – if you don't mind halving your memory bandwidth.
Most laptops have two memory channels, so if both are not populated with same size memory module, at least part of the memory range will provide only 50% bandwidth.
For memory bandwidth sensitive tasks it can halve performance, although I guess for most workloads the effect is way less, perhaps just 15-20% slowdown.
I wonder about the hardware selected for say a charger, is it maybe just that the power (CPU, memory) are just a factor of that being the most cost effective choice and the power (cpu, memory) are far more than a USB charger needs?