we're two orders of magnitude past that stage. a ryzen 7 is ten billion cmos transistors for a hundred dollars, ten nanodollars per transistor. so how much does a minimal computer cost at ten nanodollars per transistor?
the intersil im6100 was a pdp-8 cpu in 4000 cmos transistors, and the 6502 was comparable, but that's with no memory other than the cpu registers. for a useful microcontroller you probably need about 8192 bits of instruction memory and a few bytes of ram, so let's round up to 16384 transistors for a whole computer. an 8051, with built-in instruction eprom and 128 bytes of ram, was 50k. the arm2 without ram was 27k. an avr, with built-in ram and flash, is 140k. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
ergo we've been at the stage where the packaging of the chip costs more than the computer inside it since about 02009
(obviously the ryzen 7 cpu costs a great deal more than its packaging, though, because that's what you have to do when you're competing on computrons per dollar rather than gpios per dollar. in theory for 2.43¢ you should be able to get 2.4 million transistors, enough for about 300 kilobytes of rom or a 50 kilobytes of sram, or half that together with a 486 or a quad-core arm3. presumably padauk is not doing this because they're using long-obsolete semiconductor process nodes, which is also why their chips are so power-hungry)
the intersil im6100 was a pdp-8 cpu in 4000 cmos transistors, and the 6502 was comparable, but that's with no memory other than the cpu registers. for a useful microcontroller you probably need about 8192 bits of instruction memory and a few bytes of ram, so let's round up to 16384 transistors for a whole computer. an 8051, with built-in instruction eprom and 128 bytes of ram, was 50k. the arm2 without ram was 27k. an avr, with built-in ram and flash, is 140k. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
at that price, counts of 16384 to 131072 transistors work out to 0.016¢ to 0.13¢. but the cheapest computer you can buy today is a padauk pms150c https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/Microcontroller-Units-MC... which is 4.2¢ in onesies (and 2.43¢ in quantity) with 64 bytes of ram and 1024 13-bit words of one-time-programmable prom for the program https://free-pdk.github.io/chips/PMS150C. that's 150× more; in the day of moore's law doublings every two years that would have been 14 years, but now it's probably longer. (incidentally this same blog looked at them a few years ago https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2019/08/12/the-terrible-3-cent...)
ergo we've been at the stage where the packaging of the chip costs more than the computer inside it since about 02009
(obviously the ryzen 7 cpu costs a great deal more than its packaging, though, because that's what you have to do when you're competing on computrons per dollar rather than gpios per dollar. in theory for 2.43¢ you should be able to get 2.4 million transistors, enough for about 300 kilobytes of rom or a 50 kilobytes of sram, or half that together with a 486 or a quad-core arm3. presumably padauk is not doing this because they're using long-obsolete semiconductor process nodes, which is also why their chips are so power-hungry)