When Gorden Moore wrote his first paper on things doubling every fixed time period it was on the lowest cost transistors back in 1965 but the term <i>Moore&#x27;s Law</i> didn&#x27;t come into use until the mid 70s by which time he had written a number of other papers pointing out a number of other doublings including feature size.  In the old days these all doubled in lockstep so the original coinage of the term didn&#x27;t really distinguish economics from minimal feature size.<p>So there&#x27;s really no legitimate way to insist that Moore&#x27;s law has to refer to the lowest cost number of transistors.  It actually wasn&#x27;t that by coinage and it certainly isn&#x27;t that by common usage.  I&#x27;ve even got a copy of a memo by Moore in my 6.175 lecture notes endorsing a broader conception of Moore&#x27;s law.