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Intel Shipped 1 Billionth Computer Chip
murat submitted linkage to a simple little story that proclaims that Intel has recently shipped
it's One Billionth Chip. Quite an impressive accomplishment... it took them 25 years to reach the billions, but they estimate that they will hit 2 billion by only 2007.
It sounds like this is actually the billionth *CPU* from Intel, not the billionth chip. Intel produces quite a lot of other silicon in addition to the CPUs it is best known for, and I suspect that Intel actually passed the billion *chip* mark many years ago.
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That's more than 1 per second since 1 billion seconds is almost 32 years.
McDonalds opened in the Midwest (Des Plaines, IL, acutally) in 1955.
Their 50 billionth hamburger was served in New York city in or around 1984.
That's ~30 years, or an average of 1 2/3 billion per year.
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The 8088 was actually released before the 8086, but as the article states the 8086 was developed first.
No, the 8086 did come out first. It had a full 16 bit bus. The 8088 came out later with an 8 bit bus (I think the memory bus, but I am not sure about that) because manufactures were finding it was to expensive to make motherboards based on the 16 bit bus.
This site actually has a lot of good info on the early microprocessors, complete with pictures. They've even got info and pictures of the 4004! :)
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Thus,
.536*141.6e9/173e6 dollars. That works out to $438.67 Current list prices for the Intel Pentium III, 3.06 GHz, range from $365-$759.99, with an average price listing of $459.53.
13139006 * e^(.17329 * x)
Where x is in years is the cumulative output of Intel.
This allows us to calculate with high accuracy the size of Intel's production line, a secret coveted by industry insiders. Differentiating, we have:
2276816 * e^(.17329 * x)
Thus, Intel currently has 173 million processors in various production stages.
This allows us to calculate another secret, coveted by all geeks - the true value of an Intel CPU.
Intel's current market capitalization is 141.6 billion US$. Based on their Q1 2003 quarterly report, 53.6% of their cost of production (including R&D and other expenses) goes into the Intel Architecture business unit.
If we know the size of the production line, the current valuation, and the percentage dedicated to CPU production, we can compute an average valuation for an Intel CPU.
Each current issue Intel CPU should be worth, on average
Conclusion - for every current release Intel CPU you buy, on average you are being ripped off by about $20.86, about 4.75% the value of the product. That is less than sales tax, and doesn't seem like the work of a greed hungry power monster.
Any similar statistics on Microsoft's product valuation would be highly interesting.