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by phkahler 973 days ago
Manufacturing processors is expensive.

Not really. I'd say designing processors is expensive in engineering costs, and open designs are already pretty impressive and can be used as starting points. It's also expensive to optimize a design for a given process, which is necessary to get the best performance (probably by a factor of two?) from the design/process. So I'd expect the foundries to start offering optimized RISC-V cores to SoC designers as part of their offerings - especially as we reach the end of scaling.

1 comments

Ok, the designing, and tooling, testing etc.

But that just makes it worse.

If you have to spend £5million over 5 years to design something, you need to get funding until the point where you're actually selling products. If all the cost is in the actual manufacturing, you don't need the capital outlay early on.