You can not say what can or can not be afforded without knowing how much this chip costs. We know right now the ADCs etc are expensive. We know FPGA development takes a lot of time, making it expensive. We know Open Source projects reduce costs in 95% of cases. Paying 5-10 engineers 50-60k a year to develop memory controllers on an FPGA is money you can save if you have a chip that has a memory controller on it.
David Hess- Keysight, Tektronix, Rigol, all have their own ASICs. Did you even read the first post? You picked single pieces of information to base your argument on and didn´t look at the whole picture.
You say there wouldn`t be competition but when anyone can buy the same chip, if you don´t compete someone else makes the same product and your share is reduced. Also there are many ways to skin a cat. I might want to save a few bucks and buy a scope with USB 3.0 while someone else wants a larger LCD and another person wants even faster data transfer to chain instruments. Most of the things that add value to a scope are beyond the signal capture. Signal capture is only the first step. Even in the UI there are enough differences that 10 people want 10 different devices. Some people love USB scopes while others would never buy one.
Someone mentioned a ~$1300 scope with 350MHz. Hantek has a $600-700 scope with 300MHz. The thing is anything beyond that you are spending as much as a car. You are basing your arguments on hypothetical specs for a chip that has not a single feature locked in. No one including myself knows yet what this would look like.
Arguing that it is pointless is ridiculous since 6 companies each spending 1 mill plus and hoarding a chip for themselves is done for a reason. BECAUSE IT IS WORTH IT. They make so much money they don´t need to sell it to split the costs.
The argument of not being able to recover the costs is missing the point. They are buying several chips right now which cost enough to cover development of those chips, company profits for those chips, marketing costs for those chips. These costs are still there. When McDonalds sells you a Happy Meal that Toy is not free. YOu pay for the toy in the price of the happy meal. Same with buying 1 chip instead of 5-6-7-8. Buying 1 chip is cheaper because of efficiencies or NO COMPANY WOULD EVER make their own chip. It would never be worth it to combine chips into one custom chip.
Yes Intel paid less than 3 Billion compensation for 20 years of pushing them out of the market. They didn´t just pay Dell they paid ALL OEMs Toshiba, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, All of them took bribes. These companies sell/sold around 80% of the worlds PCs. AMD was forced to settle in 2007 or 08 when the recession started and they would have gone bankrupt if they hadn´t. Fact is AMD was almost locked out of the market from 1984-2012 while producing a very expensive product and that is where the money problems came from and not because the profit margins were not there. Someone did the math recently and their entire Server chip production comes from a few like 2k wafers a year. Now look at how much profit the server market brings them. That profit is coming from around 100k CPUs.
Quick google
Search: "AMD 7nm wafer cost"
AMD cost per wafer, yields, and cost per good die for 7nm, 12nm, 14nm
https://adoredtv.com/zen2-chiplet-quality-examined-by-cost/Here are similar prices for Apples wafer and die costs.
https://wccftech.com/apple-5nm-3nm-cost-transistors/Search: "300mm wafer cost"
Wafer Profits for Pure Play $7.41 per sq inch at .5 micron on a 200mm wafer $53.86 per sq in at <20nm on 300mm. So same square inch produces 8x the profit because of higher costs.
https://www.elektroniknet.de/markt-technik/halbleiter/wafer-preise-unter-druck-158732.html