On 6/21/06, Raphaël Jacquot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
howard parkin wrote:
> The Spartan 3's are cheaper. Any of the Virtex 4 chips
> with the amount of logic we need are unfeasibly costly.
>
> XC4VLX60 = $600 (a bit smaller than Spartan 3 4000)
> XC4VLX200 = $8000 !!!!
wtf, this is ridiculous... how do they expect to sell those at these
prices ??
on second thought, the idea must be to limit the use of these things in
way over budget military projects where cost is irrelevant, the "good of
the country" (whatever that may be) being the sole justification :D
Or they might just be expensive to make. The cost of a die goes up by
the 4th power of the area, IIRC. I don't know how bit their dies are,
though. They could be hard-to-make parts with poor yield or
something.
Another possibility is that they're too new, and as sales pick up, the
costs will go down. Or they've been out for a while, but the demand
is so poor, they can't make a profit at a lower price.
Xilinx don't have a monopoly on FPGAs, so they can't charge whatever
they want, although they do have the _largest_ FPGAs. They know they
want to sell products, and the first consideration of a business is
not whether they can make excessive amounts of profit but whether they
can make any at all. Xilinx have a history of being honorable, as far
as I can tell. For instance, in the dot-com bust, rather than laying
anyone off, they temporarily reduced salaries. My gut feeling is that
if they're charging this much, there's a good reason for it. But I'm
just guessing.
I think all this thought I've put into my own business has affected my
brain. Oh, no! I'm becoming a business person! Next thing you know,
I'm going to start thinking about getting an MBA (ha!).
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