There isn't really a minimum production run for silicon chips, they do small test runs all the time to test new designs.
replyAt least not from a practical perspective.
From an economic perspective, stopping after a single small run is just wasteful. The upfront design costs are so high, and the per wafer costs are so slow that you might as well make a lot extra. Maybe you can find a use for them, or sell them to someone else.
Trident 2 (article says used 8 of these chips), and google says around 400-424 made, so easily would have soaked up 4000 of these CPUs with spares alone. So if anything, the production run seems light.
replyI read they had their own fab, so the minimum production run aspect would appear moot.
> other quests we may not know about.
replyBack then an interface between terrestrial computer systems and a Zeta Reticulan spacecraft required a small supercomputer on our side.