Opus 5 Half-Price Test: Inference Costs Halved—Should Chip Designers Cheer or Wary?

When Anthropic slashed the API price for Opus 5 to half that of Fable 5, with real-world performance holding its own, my first reaction wasn't "mind-blowing"—it was grabbing a calculator. Is this a victory of model architecture, or extreme squeezing of chip compute power? As an engineer who has spent years battling the power wall of 5G basebands, I know exactly what a "price halving" usually implies: either process node bonuses are exhausted, or architectural compromises were made. But Opus 5 is different; it might be walking both lines simultaneously.