On Tue, 2 Sep 2014 08:56:23 -0400, Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
>[email protected] (Anne & Lynn Wheeler) writes:
>> this somewhat comes up in the discussion about ibm selling its chip fab
>> business ... and possibly nobody wanting to acquire the east fishkill
>> and burlington fabs. in an (linkedin) ibm employee discussion, somebody
>
>re:
>http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#20 Demonstrating Moore's law
>
Intel has spent $5B on new fab for the latest 14nm chip technology. If they
sold only
one chip they would have to add the $5B fab cost to the price of the chip.
If they sell
a billion chips, they only have to add $5 to the price of each chip (and
they have to
recover the fab cost before it is obsolete and they have to move to a new
fab with
the next generation of chip technology).
>latest story is that IBM was willing to pay $1B for somebody to take
>chip fab business ... but prospects wanted $2B.
>
But suppose IBM chooses a prospect and pays the $2B. The contract would surely
include a committment to supply IBM with N chips each at a price of
$2B/N + incremental manufacturing cost.
But who pays for the R&D and tooling for the next generation technology? Could
that be specified, firmly, in the contract?
-- gil
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