One dust particle per 12" square loses you 1 of 100 CPUs. It loses you 100% of your 50" TVs.

Also, CPU manufacturing facilities keep the insides of the machines cleaner than the facility, containing the wafers in transit between machines, and LCD manufacturers do not have the same luxury.

That lost CPU would still have potentially been worth several times as much as the 50" TV though. Intel server CPUs especially. Entry level laptop CPUs not so much. ;)

I assure you that losing 1% of the CPUs on a production line is a lot less of a disaster than losing 100% of the TVs. In one case, you have something you can do to improve yield, and in the other case you have a complete waste.

While that kind of makes some sense, it doesn't necessarily mean that LCD clean rooms are therefore the best clean room tech in the world.

I mean, I'm not saying they aren't, I just don't know. And the explanation you're presenting as the likely reason doesn't really bear that out. So far anyway. :)

I am saying it because I know it to be true. Someone later asked why LCD factories would invest in cleaner rooms than CPU fabs, and I explained the logic.

I think you're expecting some sort of first-principles argument as to why that ought to be true (or worse, asking someone to waste a bunch of time digging up a public citation on the details of factory design), which you're not going to get handed to you on a silver platter. To put it bluntly, if you want to think about it from first principles, go for it, it's not that hard. If you want a source for something covered under NDAs, you can go do the work yourself.

you can't just go by retail price though, it becomes a question of whether it's cheaper to implement a better clean room or to just slightly scale up production to account for breakage

Sure. But that doesn't really change things in favour of one or the other in the examples given.