Someone posted information about rumored Threadripper manufacturing cost. I'd simply like to see the source.
I don't need a source to know that the following statement is absurd.
Maybe you missed a zero and it's actually $1200?
If manufacturing costs were that high, not only would there be no room for profit because your pricing would have to start at at least $1,500 and since a lot of dies are cut from the same wafer and as
@systemBuilder said:
In VLSI fabrication you ALWAYS build the ultimate CPU and the stuff that fails test with JTAG is lasered out. Some of the Ryzen 5 cores probably have 8 working cores but if the customer pays only enough for 4 cores, they disable the other 4 cores. I think it's pretty clear (because there are so few SKUs and just about every chip overclocks at maximum GHz) that AMD took the time to optimize yields and process margin before releasing Ryzen.
Plus, it's not like you're making profit immediately after building it if you factor in the cost of development, the cost of your employees, the cost of marketing, etc. along with the cost of manufacturing. There are a lot of expenses that need to be taken into account when talking about the production of ICs and the actual manufacturing cost is probably a lot less than you think it is but, you probably don't realize how much money is going to the other things that got the product there. Insurance and manufacturing are two very different industries that operate differently. I would even argue that building software is more like building ICs than like insurance because the big cost isn't the manufacturing of a product or deployment of software, it's in all of the other things that lead up to it and
@systemBuilder was talking about the
manufacturing costs not total costs.
If you can't provide a source that's fine, but don't resort to baiting.
AMD isn't going to release what their margins are on a CPU, that's unwise but, it's not unrealistic to call out a nutty claim like this:
Maybe you missed a zero and it's actually $1200?
...because if manufacturing costs were that high, entry level thread-ripper would probably be north of $1.5k and possibly even 2k to actually break even because manufacturing costs are one part of the equation, not the entire one. While I understand how systemBuilder's claim can't necessarily be confirmed due to information that no one other than someone in the industry would be aware of, I was calling out the actual erroneous claim that manufacturing costs would be as high as 1.2k because
that definitely is nuts regardless if you have a source or not. Anyone who can do simple math can find out real quick that a number that high doesn't quite add up.
...but if being in the insurance industry gives
@notb a unique perspective on computer hardware, just image what being a software engineer adds to my perspective.