Re: Is Intel exceptionally unsuccessful as an architecture designer?

On Tue, 17 Sep 2024 19:58:08 +0000
mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) wrote:

On Tue, 17 Sep 2024 7:57:35 +0000, Michael S wrote:
 

On Mon, 16 Sep 2024 23:48:56 +0000
mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) wrote: 

>
Engineering costs were at least 200 engineers for 2 decades at
approximately $200K/engineer/year. ½ salary ½ SW+HW+overhead.
This turn out to be $0.8B sales costs would be extra.
 

>
Why would they need 200 engineers before 1998?
Or after 2010?
Why would they need more than 2-3 engineers after 2012? 

 
A friend of mine worked on ITanic in Longmount Co and related the
size of the team. He worked there from about 1995-2019.
>

Can you ask him what exactly did he do in 2013-2019?
From the outside it looks like no Itanium-related HW development was
done by Intel after 2012.

And my numbers did not include the software engineers on the project.
 

Did they sell $1B of these things ??
 

>
I don't know, but would think that the answer is yes.
>
In the best years (2007-2008) HP sold approximately 75K Itanium
boxen per year. Assuming an average of 3 CPUs per box and 3.5K USD
per CPU that gives 0.79 B/y. For the rest of IPF life they were
selling significantly less, but still selling something.
And there were other vendors beyond HP, although nearly all of them
jumped ship before 2008. 

 
To make "real" money MFG costs have to be less than ¼ sales price.
Somebody has to "Pay for * the FAB".
 
And it always bothered me that companies spend $1B+ to make a
FAB that produces $0.50 parts that go in $1.00 packages made
in a factory costing $50M, with $0.25 test costs.
 
 
(*) that part of the FAB capacity they occupy.

For the majority of its life Itanium CPUs were manufactored on
silicon nodes that were no longer usable for mass-market x86. For
example:
90nm - 2006-2009
65nm - 2010-2012
32nm - 2015 to 2021
Periods when Itanium competed with x86 for fab capacity were relatively
brief.