Who Can Afford to Build ICs?

Hello again this one is down to that law of diminishing returns. I think it is just a matter of time before the cost versus results will be in negative territory. In order to keep this up the volume of sales has to keep increasing. The amount of new products coming to market is begining to stall and variations on a theme are now being relied on to keep the fabrication and final product plant moving goods. A point ware saturation of the market place occurs is just around the corner for many products mobile phones, computers, TV's, home entertainment systems. The big mistake was made by the Japanese when they tried to conquer the world by out producing every one. This led to a ware between famous names and price slashing to get more market share and then to try to keep what they had. The thing is when you inervate and are first to market you enjoy a brief domination until your competitors get moving and the surplant you by adopting better means of manufacture and use of newer technology. Now we have mass produced throw awayb goods that are made to be obsolete from day one.

Those prices kind of make you want to get the design right the first time.

Yes very little margin for error just a few duff wafers could wipe out the profit on a batch. They now use 8" as far as I know but are looking to go up to 10 or even 12 "

Hey pal,

Ill be Honest. Im a carpenter and don't really know what were talking about here. But maybe you should check out Mathstar. They're loosing money every day which is pretty sketchy but they seem too have a neat product.

There are plenty hanging on by their finger nails but if they keep loosing money they will eventually go out of business. AMD the processor manufacturer are loosing money and Intel are grinning all the way to the bank if AMD die and go out of this sector Intel will just raise prices and computer makers and users will lose out because a monopoly will exist. Imagine if you could only buy wood from one supplier on the first Tuesday in the month, and then only one type of wood paying cash at an inflated rate. How would you get along?

I would be realy sorry if AMD went out of business I think there cpu technology is as good and probably a bit better than there opposition.

Whats the problem are they selling there product to cheaply?

WHAT IS THE POINT OF MORE AND MORE ON LESS AND LESS "REALESTATE."

IMHO, a stupid game of who's got the biggest and best CPU for PC's and Work Stations.

The supercomputers take advantage of parallel processing to achieve phenomenal speeds of 119 Teraflops per second. That is 119 trillion mathematical calculations per second!

<http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20070411-00>

Intel, AMD, & Microsoft have lost sight of their very reason to exist!

More speed, more bells & whistles, more expensive, more cost, and more spam, more viruses, more trojans and more problems.

What is needed is a real solid/stable operating system to accommodate a reasonable set of user's requirements.

I agree with sterling stan -the mainstream computer user needs a more stable platform before we worry about how many millionth of a blink our computer is running at. true there is a specialized need for more speed but not at the expense of software crashes due to too much progress!!

Stan -

The reason for more "stuff" on less "real estate" is that silicon is expensive. If you want to sell a lot of chips, the cost of a few mm of silicon can really add up.

- AstroNut

...another thing to consider: A faster CPU doesn't necessarily mean better performance! Memory technology is *SO* much slower than CPU technology, a 100% CPU speed upgrade might mean only 10% better performance. I'll try to find some online resources on this topic.

You're so right Astro. Mac's 700 Mhz I-Mac, was about 4 times faster than AMD-Duron 800 Mhz, doing the same job. This is a personal testimony.

Only Mac's OS-9 then, was based on RISC technology, and today's OS-X tuned for Intel's CISC CPU, is likely to be much, much slower.

"...Who Can Afford to Build ICs?..."

Anyone.

Israel's "Tower Semiconductors", Migdal Ha'emek, and "Zoran" Haifa, are two freelancing design and manufacture sub-contractors, which will either design for your specs, or manufacture your design, both having quite a bit of American, European and Far-East clients for the last twenty years or so.

Both involved in LSI and VLSI designs.

Such a solution is one possible venue for the described above.