At 07:18 PM 3/21/2006, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Pfenniger"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Jim Lux" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <beowulf@beowulf.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2006 6:32 PM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Vector coprocessors
If you produce such cards in low quantity you lose roughly 100 dollar to
the pci card to
royalties basically then add chip production price. 2 big chips, well i do
not know what price
they are. Sound expensive to me. I talked about 1 big chip for some other
card.
That chip had a price, when mass produced, of 50 dollar a chip.
If it's a full custom chip, figure a "first chip" cost of $2M. (layout, a
couple spins, etc., but assuming you know basically what the chip is
supposed to do and how to do it)
I work with a fair number of very low volume but fairly complex chips
(intended for space applications, but not in Class S quality grade) and
they all seem to run about $5K to $10K each, which must be a sort of basic
price for them to build small runs where there's not a huge NRE. Things
like MOSIS (http://www.mosis.org/) (or Atmel's equivalent, the name of
which I forget) can be less expensive, but probably not for something of
this scale. $5K probably covers the cost of running the wafer, dicing,
testing, and putting it in a package, in quantities of <100.
So, to get the $50/chip cost, you need an order of 40,000-50,000 pieces.
So bare production price of this card i estimate at around 250 dollar. You
don't want to lose bigtime
on such a card of course.
That means an importer price of 500 and a consumer price is a minimum of
1000 dollar.
When I was working for a developer of retail products, we'd figure retail
selling price is 10x material cost. For products with high integration
(i.e. an ASIC) you'd probably go down to 5x.
Now you skip the importer of course with such types of cards.
According to my economy book then a company can then follow 2 approaches.
You can try to
flood the market and sell 50 million of them, which means that the card
will be priced 1000 dollar.
Don't need to sell that many.. a hundred thousand would probably do <grin>
If you're serious and you want to buy 200 of their cards, then you're a
big customer.
Propose them a secret deal in this sense that you don't publicly reveal
the price paid,
and you sign for it that first 3 years you won't resell their cards nor
lend them nor hire them
to other persons. Under that condition you offer $200k for 200 cards.
But they're not going to even be able to cover a fraction of
the development cost for that. But, perhaps, if they are thinking about
"buying market share" with OPM (other people's money). It's been done, more
than once.
Jim
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