Recap

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Recap
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Cost and Trends in Cost

• Cost is an important factor in the design of any
  computer system (except may be supercomputers)
• Cost amount spent by manufacturer to produce a
  finished good
• Cost changes over time
• The learning curve
• High volume products lowers manufacturing costs
• Commodity products decreases cost as well
• Commodities identical products sold by many
  vendors in large volumes (keyboards, DRAMs) low
  cost because of high volume and competition among
  suppliers

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Processor Prices
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Memory Prices
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Wafer, Die, IC
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Cost of Integrated Circuits
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Explanations
Second term in Dies per wafer corrects for the
rectangular dies near the periphery of round
wafers
Die yield assumes a simple empirical model
defects are randomly distributed over the wafer,
and yield is inversely proportional to the
complexity of the fabrication process (indicated
by a)
a3-4 for modern processes implies that cost of
die is proportional to (Die area)4
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Where Do The Transistors Go?

• Logic contributes a (vanishingly) small fraction
  of the number of transistors
• Memory (mostly on-chip cache) is the biggest
  fraction
• Computing is free, communication is expensive

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Cost of ComputersWhat is Relationship of Cost to
Price?
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Cost and Price

• A 1000 increase in cost may result in a 3000
  increase
• in price hence, important to understand the
  relationship
• The relationship is complex for example, a
  company may
• underprice a product that has heavy competition
  and
• overprice a product that has no competition

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Contribution of IC Costs to Total System Cost
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Desktop Prices
All systems have similar configurations price
variations due to expandability, expensive
disks/memory/processor/OS, commoditization
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Server Prices