Exercise 1: Why the $25 Price Point Is "the Founding Fact of the Whole Chip" — Possible Solution
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WHY IT'S MORE THAN A DETAIL
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Per the chapter's own framing, the 6502 team specifically LEFT another
company to build something radically cheaper than the Intel 8080 --
the $25 price wasn't a number attached to the chip after it was
designed, it was the actual design brief the team was working toward
from the very start. That distinction matters: a price point reached
AFTER a design is finished is just a business decision; a price point
set BEFORE design begins becomes a hard constraint every single
engineering choice has to work within.

WHAT THIS SUGGESTS ABOUT THE ARCHITECTURE
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If $25 was the real goal, and the 8080 cost $179, that's roughly a
7x cost reduction target. Chip cost in that era was driven heavily by
die size and transistor count -- more transistors meant a bigger,
more expensive-to-manufacture chip with a lower yield per silicon
wafer. A team aiming for that kind of price cut would have every
incentive to minimize transistor count everywhere possible: fewer
registers, a smaller instruction set, simpler addressing logic --
anything that shrinks the die. This directly previews the reasoning
assembly1-1 already used to explain the 6502's own famously small
register set as a real, historically-grounded design consequence,
not an arbitrary choice.

THE BROADER IMPLICATION
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If the price target genuinely came first, then a great deal of what
makes the 6502 look "minimal" later in this course likely isn't
minimalism for its own sake, or a deliberate elegance choice -- it's
the visible fingerprint of that original $25 constraint showing up
throughout the design. That's exactly why the chapter treats the
price point as foundational rather than incidental: it's presented as
the lens through which the rest of the 6502's actual architecture
(covered starting in cpu8bit1-2) should be read.

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It explains why a pre-design cost target functions differently from a
post-design price tag, connects that constraint concretely to likely
architectural consequences (transistor/die-size pressure pushing
toward fewer registers and a smaller instruction set), and ties the
reasoning back to assembly1-1's own precedent for reading design
choices as real historical consequences rather than arbitrary facts.