Active Topics
-
Porting apps to Leste (32)
to Maemo 7 / Leste by Arno_11 - 5 days, 20 hrs ago - more...
| The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to TA-t3 For This Useful Post: | ||
|
2009-10-30
, 13:53
|
|
Posts: 1,255 |
Thanked: 393 times |
Joined on Oct 2009
@ US
|
#32
|
Originally Posted by texaslabrat
Wafer yield is the other issue. Run into diminished returns at some point. Scrap is a the big nasty here as far as total cost of process. SPC in these processes are always looking at the yield curve of good chips.
Speaking in very rough numbers, the cortex A8 has about 4 times the number of transistors as ARM11. However, when cortex A8 is manufactured on a 65nm process, the actual size of the chip is roughly twice the size of the ARM11 core when the ARM11 is manufactured on a 90nm process and thus twice as expensive as that ARM11. If they were both manufactured on a 65nm process to maintain an apples-to-apples comparison...the Cortex A8 would be about 4 times as large, and thus about 4 times as expensive to make as that hypothetical 65nm ARM11.
Without going into *too* much detail... large volume IC manufacturing costs are very strongly linearly related to the size of the chips (within the same technology "generation/family" eg SOI, strained silicon, copper interconnects, etc) due to the built-in costs of the wafers they are made from as well as the staggering up-front capital costs for the equipment.
Hope that clears it up a bit.
| The Following User Says Thank You to Rushmore For This Useful Post: | ||
N800/OS2007|N900/Maemo5
-- Metalayer-crawler delenda est.
-- Current state: Fed up with everything MeeGo.