On 4 September 2014 21:00, Anne & Lynn Wheeler <[email protected]> wrote: > I've periodically wondered if ibm mainframe pricing is somewhat along > the lines of airline seat sales ... if you already flying the plane > ... then getting any money at all for otherwise empty seats is better > than nothing. when i did chips, the smallest wafer run i typically could > get was six wafers. in 14nm technology & 450mm wafers yielding 1383 > chips, a minimum run would be 8298 chips. the major customer base > currently is maybe 1100-1200/annum ... then there would be a significant > number of left-over chips that need to be unloaded before the > introduction of the next generation (chips). And just like airline seats > ... they wouldn't want to see those paying the premium prices switching to > significantly discounted product.
Which is why I've wondered here why IBM doesn't try to find some market for those chips that's different enough from the traditional mainframe one that it won't bite into it, but still lets them sell the chips for at least something. Well, maybe they have tried, and maybe there just isn't any such market, given the characteristics of the chips: ho-hum price/performance, not massively parallel, but extreme on-chip reliability. Presumably market segments that need reliability have already worked around flaky chips by using other (higher layer) approaches. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
