Wowsers. An index of refraction of only 1.1 is damned impressive.
The fibers are k3w1, but what I really want to know is how they got the silly things to be so much less of a "drag" than teflon. If they can extend that, it has a lot more immediate applications as a low- material than as a fast lightpipe.
You can find it in the "clocking" session from ISSCC two years back. Slick stuff, doesn't use as much power and gets much less clock skew than a clock tree does.
so getting to the first chip runs at least 15-20 million dollars and for something like the core2 duo it's closer to 500 -1000 million.
Yup. And your point is... ?
the next wafer only costs a measly 10k
And the next million wafers cost how much?
Nobody builds stuff like that with a run rate of a few measly thousand. No way to recover the NRE. If the variable costs don't dominate the bugetary numbers, then the project doesn't get authorized.
By the way:
software for synthesis, implementation, timing/physical/formal verification, OPC, power/temp analysis and all the other stuff runs in the millions of dollars.
That's just the ante to get in the game.
20 engineers working for 3 years + benefits/managers/other overhead ~10 million dollars.
Unless you're doing some massive reuse, that's not even a pimple on the actual project cost. A major CPU design team runs to the hundreds of engineers. My team, which is doing microcontrollers, is about twenty.
* mask costs 100's of thousands of dollars.
Is way, way out of date. 65 nm mask sets for SOI run well over a million. Last I looked, much closer to two million.
Once the "first chip" is made the margin cost is VERY low.
Boy, Howdy! are you out of the loop. I work on those suckers and believe you me, the chip cost is not trivial.
Do the math: the cost of a 300 mm wafer in a 65 nm process runs well over $5000 (how much is a Deep Dark Secret.) Ignoring geometric yield loss, that's about 70,000 mm of potential dice per. If one chip is 350 square mm, you're getting about 200 per wafer, or $25 per chip fab cost. Yield drops off steeply with size (think in terms of losing ten to twenty dice per wafer, regardless of die size) and that adds into the fab cost too.
That's bare minimum, assuming there aren't any bad lots etc. It adds up fast.
I can all too easily see my telco installing fiber to the curb all over the area with the wonderful promise of IPTV and blazing speed. Not that "no, thank you, I'll keep copper" will be an option.
Then when it happens (of course) DSL won't work, the only remaining "high-speed" connection will be a slice of fiber bandwidth, the only ISP you can get will be MSN, and the bandwidth slice if you don't want television will be 256 kb/s.
I've never seen a technological advance yet that Ma Bell hasn't tried to prevent, and I've been watching them fight a rearguard action against the 20th Century (no, that's not a mistake) for over 40 years.
Now that it is a standard, does that mean that the specifications are openly available, and that other programs can use these standards to make compatible documents without royalty concerns?
According to Marbux (a retired attorney; see GrokLaw) the MS "we won't sue you into oblivion" pledge contains enough lawyerese that it turns the apparent promise into "unless we damn well feel like it, and there's nothing you can do about it."
Anyone else find it amusing that he selected Bell Labs as the "good" research company?
I'm no fan of Ma Bell, but don't tar Bell Labs with that brush.
Admittedly, their free-flowing research money derived as much from the fact that the FCC counted the Labs into the cost basis for AT&T's profits (in other words, they made a profit on every dollar spent). That said, however, they did have a nearly blank check to do Really Amazingly Cool Research without Corporate demanding that it all pay off in the next quarter.
Their like will not be seen again for a long time, and we're all the poorer for it.
Yeah -- then the product doesn't work, you attempt to return it, and the retailer points out that they only accept returns of the complete package (presumably so that they can close it up and let some other poor schmuck buy it, until eventually someone keeps it rather than go to the trouble of returning it.)
Alternately, they insist that the obviously-enormous forces you used to open the package must have damaged the product, so it's not their problem.
Yeah, both are bogus and if you stand up for your rights you get action -- but what do you want to bet a lot of people don't?
I wonder how many people posted this one before it got accepted? After all, it only happened two freaking days ago with months of notice. It's so old the stories were in print papers yesterday, and the GrokLaw newspick that announces the official transcript [1] scrolled off the main page yesterday.
I used to read/. for breaking news. Now it's just windy.
[1] Courts are not known for haste in posting official transcripts./. is, apparently, quite a bit slower.
The rules shouldn't be changed, but rather people should understand that the definition of "publish" has in fact changed. Google, MS, Slashdot, etc. are not making an active, reviewed, and personal decision to make public whatever information they receive, but are acting as worlds in which such information is indexed and searched. We should make a distinction between active publication and passive publication. This would definitely solve a few problems.
Except in this case Rosenthal did exercise editorial control. She doesn't run a blog comments section; she broadcast Bolen's accusations to Usenet under her own account.
If Georgii Porgiov distributes counterfeit copies of Microsoft software, he violates copyright laws.
No doubt about it. However, as in the USA, there are times when you can't go to the Courts to get things you want (such as a judgment of infringement.) For instance, if you're an escaped murderer with a death sentence in the USA, filing suit against your landlord isn't going to do you much good.
What power does the EU ultimately have to enforce the fines at this point if MS simply doesnt pay the fines: Are they prepared to ban the importation of MS products and quit the MS Windows habit cold turkey?
Oh, I can think of one or two other possibilities.
For instance, has it occurred to you that Microsoft's whole business is built on having a State-granted monopoly?
Let me put it this way: MS files suit against Georgii Porgiov for cranking out 30 million counterfeit copies of MSWindows and selling them in the EU. GP's defense is that Microsoft is outside of the Court's jurisdiction (as witness this case) and thus doesn't have standing to bring a case before EU Courts. The Court finds for GP.
It used to be called outlawry: you were, literally, outside the law. Anyone could do anything to you and you couldn't rely on the legal system to defend you because you'd placed yourself outside of its authority.
Beyond that, there are actually mechanisms for getting a European court ruling enforced against properties in the USA.
Well, it looks like Bill is going to have to turn over some pocket lint.
Face it -- the fines aren't even petty cash. MS expects the Court of First Instance to rule in a few months, and it would be stupid to turn over information that can't be recalled before then.
At absolute worst, the fines are worth less than the ability to hold off competition for the same period; it's just part of the cost of doing business.
The ink on the Novell-MS deal isn't even dry yet and Ballmer is publicly announcing his intention to violate it.
In case nobody noticed, one of the clauses is that Microsoft won't cut any similar deals with Linux companies for at least three years. It's barely three days and they're already trolling for more.
Ice ages are also natural, but I guarantee you don't want to be around for the next one.
The Hell I don't. The last several made the climate around here downright delightful -- cooler, damper, lush foliage, milder summers, better skiing in winter...
OK, I admit that I haven't read the UN papers etc. to confirm, but if indeed the climatologists are basing their predictions on a revised value of Boltzman's Constant, they really need to mention their findings to the rest of the physicists. Even as a semiconductor engineer, I use it every day and if it's more than twice the value I'm using in my own calculations, none of my circuits are going to work.
It's a common misonception that flash ins't accessible, the latest versions are very much so. JK Rowlings new site is meant to be a good example of this.
Wow -- who knew? How do I turn on text-only mode for the Flash player so that sites like this sites become navigable in text mode?
Slashdot Mirror
The fibers are k3w1, but what I really want to know is how they got the silly things to be so much less of a "drag" than teflon. If they can extend that, it has a lot more immediate applications as a low- material than as a fast lightpipe.
You can find it in the "clocking" session from ISSCC two years back. Slick stuff, doesn't use as much power and gets much less clock skew than a clock tree does.
Yup. And your point is ... ?
And the next million wafers cost how much?
Nobody builds stuff like that with a run rate of a few measly thousand. No way to recover the NRE. If the variable costs don't dominate the bugetary numbers, then the project doesn't get authorized.
By the way:
That's just the ante to get in the game.
Unless you're doing some massive reuse, that's not even a pimple on the actual project cost. A major CPU design team runs to the hundreds of engineers. My team, which is doing microcontrollers, is about twenty.
Is way, way out of date. 65 nm mask sets for SOI run well over a million. Last I looked, much closer to two million.
Boy, Howdy! are you out of the loop. I work on those suckers and believe you me, the chip cost is not trivial.
Do the math: the cost of a 300 mm wafer in a 65 nm process runs well over $5000 (how much is a Deep Dark Secret.) Ignoring geometric yield loss, that's about 70,000 mm of potential dice per. If one chip is 350 square mm, you're getting about 200 per wafer, or $25 per chip fab cost. Yield drops off steeply with size (think in terms of losing ten to twenty dice per wafer, regardless of die size) and that adds into the fab cost too.
That's bare minimum, assuming there aren't any bad lots etc. It adds up fast.
There should be some really interesting stuff this year on how they kept the power down.
Of course, a chip nearly 2 cm on a side is going to be a beast no matter what. This is going to be fun!
Then when it happens (of course) DSL won't work, the only remaining "high-speed" connection will be a slice of fiber bandwidth, the only ISP you can get will be MSN, and the bandwidth slice if you don't want television will be 256 kb/s.
I've never seen a technological advance yet that Ma Bell hasn't tried to prevent, and I've been watching them fight a rearguard action against the 20th Century (no, that's not a mistake) for over 40 years.
Why do I have this urge to post the entire Monte Python "Dead Parrot" sketch?
Admittedly, their free-flowing research money derived as much from the fact that the FCC counted the Labs into the cost basis for AT&T's profits (in other words, they made a profit on every dollar spent). That said, however, they did have a nearly blank check to do Really Amazingly Cool Research without Corporate demanding that it all pay off in the next quarter.
Their like will not be seen again for a long time, and we're all the poorer for it.
then they fight you,
Hmmm -- does this mean we're at Stage Two?
Alternately, they insist that the obviously-enormous forces you used to open the package must have damaged the product, so it's not their problem.
Yeah, both are bogus and if you stand up for your rights you get action -- but what do you want to bet a lot of people don't?
I used to read /. for breaking news. Now it's just windy.
[1] Courts are not known for haste in posting official transcripts. /. is, apparently, quite a bit slower.
Except in this case Rosenthal did exercise editorial control. She doesn't run a blog comments section; she broadcast Bolen's accusations to Usenet under her own account.
First, get them dependent on MS technologies such as Mono, then tell them time is up and they have to pay or get sued into oblivion.
"Nice little enterprise IT setup you have here. Pity if a court slapped an injunction on it."
Red Hat refuses to take the "pill" so Microsoft "forces" it on them? This is something good?
Treaties are agreements between nations. It's still up to the nations to codify and enforce their terms by means of national laws.
And courts.
For instance, has it occurred to you that Microsoft's whole business is built on having a State-granted monopoly?
Let me put it this way: MS files suit against Georgii Porgiov for cranking out 30 million counterfeit copies of MSWindows and selling them in the EU. GP's defense is that Microsoft is outside of the Court's jurisdiction (as witness this case) and thus doesn't have standing to bring a case before EU Courts. The Court finds for GP.
It used to be called outlawry: you were, literally, outside the law. Anyone could do anything to you and you couldn't rely on the legal system to defend you because you'd placed yourself outside of its authority.
Beyond that, there are actually mechanisms for getting a European court ruling enforced against properties in the USA.
Face it -- the fines aren't even petty cash. MS expects the Court of First Instance to rule in a few months, and it would be stupid to turn over information that can't be recalled before then.
At absolute worst, the fines are worth less than the ability to hold off competition for the same period; it's just part of the cost of doing business.
The ink on the Novell-MS deal isn't even dry yet and Ballmer is publicly announcing his intention to violate it.
In case nobody noticed, one of the clauses is that Microsoft won't cut any similar deals with Linux companies for at least three years. It's barely three days and they're already trolling for more.
Somehow it doesn't sound nearly so comforting put that way, does it?
OK, I admit that I haven't read the UN papers etc. to confirm, but if indeed the climatologists are basing their predictions on a revised value of Boltzman's Constant, they really need to mention their findings to the rest of the physicists. Even as a semiconductor engineer, I use it every day and if it's more than twice the value I'm using in my own calculations, none of my circuits are going to work.
Maybe finally we can put a stake through the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Flash-only sites.