On 5/29/12 8:11 AM, Joerg Schilling wrote:
Erik Trimble<[email protected]> wrote:
Because it was quite behind the current bleeding edge in terms of
process size, that meant there were a large number of available contract
Fabs that were able to manufacture the chip, and per-chip costs were
significantly less than one might expect for "current era" CPU. That
is, sure, Intel can do 22nm nowadays, but the plant that makes that
costs $20 BILLLION or more. That's a whole lot of sunk cost to recuperate.
The development costs for Sun4m have been 3 million US$, the development costs
for the first Pentium (at the same time) was 3 billion US$.
[I'm not going to discuss the packaging stuff, but as for chip costs:]
It's unlikely that the development costs were really 1000x different,
unless these numbers are counting different things. There are really 3
components that get counted here:
1. The actual design cost. I.e. salaries, plus CAD software/hardware
and office space, etc.
2. Cost of prototype silicon for debugging and to get to good yield,
silicon for qualification tests, and samples for customer systems. Plus
tester setup (probe cards, load boards, burn-in boards, etc.).
3. R&D to develop the manufacturing technology, including engineering
cost, the cost of the Fab, and prototype silicon.
Generally, 3 > 2 > 1.
Based on this, I have to assume a $3bn figure for Pentium includes the
full process development cost. But $3m seems way low.
I am not going to comment on prototype or test costs. And I was not at
Sun at the time and don't know how long the design took, or how many
people were on the design team, or the exact salaries. But if I assume
1.5 years for the design (low, I think), 50 designers (possibly low;
teams today are larger [*]), and a probably low guess of $70k average
salary back then, then this comes to about $10m just for engineer's
salaries and benefits. As mentioned, you need to add tester hardware,
prototype silicon and testing, etc. Plus CAD software and computers.
No way does this come to $3m total.
Hugh.
[*] the original "sun4" SPARC CPU was apparently done with 10 designers,
but this is not usual.
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