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While I'm sure the numbers are questionable, I do like the implication that Free Software has grown into the equivalent of a $60 billion market. That makes us bigger than the Chinese chip market http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA6518735.html and auto electronics http://www.instat.com/press.asp?Sku=IN0603375RE&ID=1752

That's just the thing. You can't put an exact price on materials for a high technology item like Cell for instance.

Well, you can, but that's only a tiny fraction of it's real cost, so it's an essentially meaningless number.

Let's make some assumptions here, for the purpose of analogy.

Assume it cost $1 Billion to develop the technology in Cell.

Assume that it cost annother $1 Billion to build and / or retool the foundries that make Cell processors.

Assume that the cost in raw materials is $20 for each cell chip.

Assume that it takes 1 hour of assembly line time to build a Cell chip.

Assume that the foundry can build 50 cell chips simultaniously.

Assume that it costs $1,000 an hour to run the foundry (not including materials).

That gives us a rough cost on the part itself. $1000 / 50 chips simultaniously = $20 in foundry time per chip + $20 in materials = $40.

That gives you a very simple, very wrong (depending on your point of view) number of $40 per chip.

Now you have the sticky matter of that $2 Billion to deal with. ($1 Billion in R&D + $1 Billion for the foundry).

This is simply a matter of scale. If I make 1 Million chips, then I divide $2 Billion by 1 Million units and come up with $2,000 per chip. For a total cost of $2,040 per chip.

Now if I don't stop building the chips after a couple months, and actually make say, 100 Million of them over a few years, then you're looking at a cost of $60 per chip (($2B / 100M Units) + $40 = $60). Huge difference. Mostly because of the startup costs. Are you amortizing those into 1 Million units or 100 Million? Simple, really. But it makes putting a precise, tidy number on the cost of the part hard to do.

Now the cost of each new technology in PS3 is going to have the same problems (though probably most intense with the Cell chip). Blu-Ray, I would expect similar issues, though not as dramaticly. And there are other factors I haven't accounted for as well (Bad yields, patents, lowering of production costs over time, etc.). But when they say the actual parts for a Core 2 or an FX are only a few dollars, they're right.

Please note that I'm not in any way an insider in this area, I've just read just enough to be dangerous. All the numbers here were just made up on the spot, and may be wildly inaccurate. They should, however convey the basic idea of how the economics of this kind of thing works. You can read a bit more about this here if you're curious, or you can purchase the origional report here if you have $3,000 sitting around.

Hopefully this clears things up though.

Looks like someone RTFA a bit wrong. Ben Sander works for AMD. He is one of their media presenters. Here are a few of the events he has done: http://www.cpd.iit.edu/cpd/events.htm http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r4/chicago/foxvalley/meet. thru.mid2005.html http://www.instat.com/FallMPF/06/conf1.htm http://mtv.ece.ucsb.edu/MTV/index_files/program-mt v.txt

-No keyboard at a time with mobile computing is moving to keyboards: check

-It's basically a big PDA at a time when the PDA market is on it's death bead: check

-It's not a phone at a time when the smartphone market is growing rapidly: check

Either Microsoft knows something nobody else does, they're just playing a niche for incrimental revenue, or, well, I don't know. I don't get it.

TW

The report from In-state (table of contents) costs $3k. And they don't accept Paypal.

The report from In-state (table of contents) costs $3k. And they don't accept Paypal.

The report from In-state (table of contents) costs $3k. And they don't accept Paypal.

[1] This does not include research and writing costs.

Also,

At least 56% of Slashdotters pull arbitrary statistics out of their asses in order to make a point.

Only 30% of Slashdotters are emotionally involved enough in the argument to actually check someone else's figures.

15% of the time I realize that you were right halfway through my argument, and I feel stupid.

100% of the time I admit it when I'm being a stupid monkey.

85% of Slashdotters will at some point or another read Slashdot while not wearing pants.

"--a move that further edges out AMD and Intel from the mobile processor marketplace."

Check out this link

How can you say that Intel and AMD are being edged out of the mobile processor market? Intel holds a large major of the market share. Sure AMD doesn't have a large market share but neither does Transmeta or VIA. No matter what Microsoft does, it going to take a lot more than an agreement with Transmeta to knock Intel out of the Majority in the Mobile Market....

I googled, and found this and this, both of which rate Sony as the biggest, one of which specifically includes GameBoy. They're both admittedly a little out of date.

Could it be that most users on the internet are just there to send e-mail back & forth between their families, or to hang out in chat rooms?

This is because most people do not need broadband and cannot justify the increased cost just for the online activities listed above. That is why by 2005 broadband will will just be catching up to dial-up percentage wise for users of the internet..

At the end of 2001, there were only 8.2 million cable modem users in all of North America. I doubt that cablevision has that big of a chunk of them.

Look for yourself