I hate that you're getting downvoted for this. The original paper[1] isn't even 4 pages long, yet most haven't bothered to read it. If they would, they'd see he was speaking about fabrication costs. In particular, it's this passage that got distorted by media:
"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000."
Somehow what became known as "Moore's Law" excluded any reference to costs. For a similar distortion, see the "Turing Test".
That's not really true. Moore's 1965 paper was the first reference to periodic doubling in ICs but nobody called it "Moore's Law" then. Moore put out a few other papers then at the conference where Dennard gave his famous presentation on scaling laws someone coined the phrase "Moore's Law" in an interview and in that interview and in usage since then it was always ambiguous exactly which doubling it referred to because until the breakdown of Dennard scaling all good things doubled together.
No, the parent is right. Moore's law is about the transistor density of the least cost process. This is a quote from Moore's paper [1]:
"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year [...].".
When the cost part became tough the "cost side" was progressively dropped by being more and more creative on what cost is considered. First ignoring the NRE part to look only at the marginal cost per transistor. Then even this got problematic and the cost aspect was just ignored.
The "true" Moore low creates a virtuous cycle: everybody move to the next node as it's better and cheaper, so there's no point to stay back. Also, because cost gets down the addressable market gets bigger, sustaining more costly fabs. This virtuous cycle operated for a long while, so much that many takes it for granted now.
But if Moore's law die by not being lower cost (the other way is by not increasing density, and this is still progressing if slower than before), this virtuous cycle is broken. You can get higher density, but at a higher cost. With cost increasing only a subset of the market will move on to higher density. Little by little, the market size supporting the costlier high end will get smaller, while the fab cost is still increasing, contributing to a slower progress too. The virtuous cycle becomes vicious. This is happening now, although it's not too bad yet with enough very large actor able to sustain higher price (thanks Apple, I don't use you products but do benefit from all the money you're pouring into TSMC ;).
And in the end, if this gets to a serious slow down, then there is the specter of commoditization. It won't happen soon, only after a possibly very long transition period as the tech is really hard. But if progress slows a lot, the lagger may eventually catch up. With more competition would come lower margins. Which is definitely bad for stock valuation. We're still far away from this, but it's still a possibility. Look how the process leader has always been the biggest cheerleader for the "Moore low is still alive and well" (and let's not talk cost between friends, shall we?). See how it was Intel when they started selling their 10nm future, and look how more discrete they are now, and how TSMC has replaced them as the "everything is fine" voice.
No, Moore's law is transistor density (technically the ‘Number of Components Per Integrated Function’) at the minimum cost per component. Since cost per transistor is still falling on newer nodes, it holds.
Cost per transistor is still a relevant property, but it's harder to analyze since cost numbers aren't public, verifiable figures, plus the estimates I've seen were heavily criticized by people with better information, but from what I can tell it would just offset the rate of growth, not negate it.
