> If the market fragments into 10 $100m vendors, then to get the same amount of money spent checking each chip for bugs, you'd have to spend 10x as much of your budget on quality control.
But there's a much smaller attack surface and the incentives for attackers are significantly changed. Homogeneity is always more vulnerable to disaster, whether we're talking about food supply or chips.
And quality is not directly a function of money spent. Customers will start demanding to see the machine checked proofs that your hardware is correct. Intel has been cowboy coding CPUs for way too long.
But there's a much smaller attack surface and the incentives for attackers are significantly changed. Homogeneity is always more vulnerable to disaster, whether we're talking about food supply or chips.