[Dylan16807]

What I'm saying is: it might be appropriate to look at specific kinds of diamond because of the complexity of lithography and such. But the purity of the wafer doesn't matter because that has nothing to do with chip cost.

That post was wrong about that being a driver of costs, and it's not fruitful to build on that wrongness.

An analogy that leads you to the right conclusion for the wrong reason is a toxic thing.

[simoncion]

Do you mean to say that silicon wafers with higher guaranteed purity are not more expensive than those with lower guaranteed purity? I'm seriously asking; I don't know.

To speak to the rest of your comment:

mozumder made an incorrect argument and backed it up with a dangerously misleading analogy. I attacked the analogy by demonstrating its inappropriateness.

In my most recent post, I have attacked his argument with an analysis of what appear to be the actual costs of the thing he's talking about.

[mozumder]

A wafer cost isn't insignificant. It's still a lot more expensive than aluminum platters in a hard drive, especially when you're dealing with gobs of chips in an SSD.

Add in processing costs and it really becomes a mess.

So, yes, wafer costs matter when you have to produce tons of silicon for an SSD.

[simoncion]

> A wafer cost isn't insignificant.

This [0] seems to indicate that in mid 2009, one could get a 300mm silicon wafer for -worst case- ~$120.

Likely usable wafer area: 90,000mm^2

Largest Intel i3 processor (Haswell) die area: 181mm^2

Max dies per wafer: 497

Silicon wafer cost per die:

* Assuming 0% defect rate: $0.24

* Assuming 50% defect rate: $0.48

* Assuming 99% defect rate: $30.00

Cheapest (Celeron) Haswell on sale at Newegg today: $44.99. Average i3 Haswell price: $140. [1]

Unless Reuters is misinformed, or wafer costs have exploded in the past six years[2], the cost of the wafer truly does appear to be insignificant, even if we assume that wholesale prices are 50% of retail prices.

[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/07/21/shinetsu-idUSBNG50...

[1] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/cpu/

[2] This seems unlikely, as memory and chip costs haven't exploded in the past six years.

[mozumder]

This thread is about SSDs. You're forgetting that you need a hundred of these to make a 1TB SSD.

Consider the $0.24/die, and multiply that by 100 to get a 1 TB SSD drive.

Your SSD now has a minimum cost of $24, just for the silicon. That's extremely expensive. You can never sell your SSD for cheaper than that, just to cover the silicon costs of a 1TB drive, never-mind processing, manufacturing, distribution, sales, and profit. And you're competing against 5TB hard drives that sells for $100. (the 16TB SSD meanwhile apparently uses 500 chips..)

This is why wafer costs are like diamonds, instead of aluminum platters.

[simoncion]

> This thread is about SSDs.

This sub-thread is about your unhelpful and misleading equivalence and analogy. :)

Silicon wafer costs are like silicon wafer costs. Your diamond analogy is simply inappropriate.

We don't say "Aircraft grade aluminium costs are like diamonds, rather than hard drive aluminium platters." or "Fission reactor grade steel costs are like diamonds, rather than..." because this is an immensely silly thing to say that obfuscates the true cost of the material in question.

What's more, we can generally discover the high end of the true price of the material in question with a little work. As I demonstrated in my replies to you, silicon wafer costs are substantially cheaper than equivalent diamond costs.

If you had said something along the lines of "Due in part to the cost of silicon wafers, silicon-based data storage technologies are now and will be for the foreseeable future substantially more expensive on a per-GB basis than spinning rust or tape-based technologies.", I would have had absolutely nothing at all to object to.

> Consider the $0.24/die...

That figure is based on a particular die area. I would expect a flash memory die to be substantially smaller than a CPU die. This would drive the base cost per die down even further. Moreover, that figure was from 2009. Up to date figures are required to really put a floor on chip prices. :)

> And [that 1TB SSD] competes against 5TB hard drives that sells for $100.

Sort of. For every use that I have except for bulk data storage, I recognize the vast superiority of an SSD. The only HDDs in my computers are the ones I got for free with my laptops-turned-servers that don't do much disk IO, and the disk array that holds my 5TB-and-growing Postgres database.

For the average computer user, I would strongly recommend replacement of the HDD in their computer with an SSD. If you don't need to store more than 1TB of data[0], the performance gains over HDDs are just too great to use anything else.

I'm fairly confident that HDDs will be substantially cheaper per GB than SSDs for the foreseeable future. I'm -however- not convinced by your implicit argument that SSDs will always be -price-wise- unattractive when compared to HDDs. SSDs seem to be sold at the price-per-GB of the HDDs of ~3->5 years ago. We will inevitably see 500GB SSDs at the $80 retail price point.[1] This will make them a no-brainer for every big computer manufacturer. A really fast disk makes slow kit feel really fucking fast.

[0] In my experience, almost no non-technical user has more than 500GB of data that they care about on their machine at any one time.

[1] They're only a little more than twice that price now.

[mozumder]

unfortunately, SSDs are going to be more expensive for the foreseeable future, and part of that is because the material costs are much higher.

We need to make sure that everyone understands why, and part of that is because we're using lots of silicon crystals, which have the same lattice structure as diamonds, which are going to be more expensive than aluminum platters.

If you take it to the limit, an SSD won't be cheaper than hard drives even as processing costs go down, because they use so much silicon.

You say the silicon costs are insignificant, but it will be a limit as prices go down.

The diamond analogy works appropriately, and it's unhelpful and inappropriate to claim material costs are insignificant.

And people are always going to end up using as much space as given, so that's another mistake you're making. They will find ways, especially given high-res smartphones everywhere with cameras.

[simoncion]

> ...people are always going to end up using as much space as given...

I used to be certain of that, based on my personal space usage habits. Based on my ongoing survey of both technical and non-technical computer users, I no longer believe that to be true.

The rise of The Cloud(TM) means that there are shockingly few users who intentionally keep a local copy of their data. Media streaming and synced storage means that a wide swath of the computer-using population store that shit remotely and throw away data when The Cloud(TM) gets full.

> ...it's unhelpful and inappropriate to claim [silicon wafer] costs are insignificant.

When the analysis demonstrates that the costs are an insignificant fraction of the total cost, then it is entirely appropriate to make that claim. :)

Silicon wafers may well remain more expensive than harddrive platters. The price of silicon wafers may well mean that SSDs will never reach price parity with HDDs. These facts don't magically make $0.25 per chip a significant factor in the manufacturing cost of a product that also required substantial original research and development to come to market. :)