Hi Dave B; Your pricing figures are faulty because you are trying to compare pricing of RDRAM with pricing of RIMMs. The 4x relationship does not apply to two commodities like that. Go do the same calculation on an Nvidia graphics card, (SDRAM or DDR SDRAM) etc. My comment was in the context of discussions of embedded system design, not module mass production. If anything, my 4x number is an understatement. Doubt this? Go price some i820 or i840 based embedded systems and find out. Here's a good link to start with:
rtcgroup.com
To ge to the higher overhead stuff, you have to include things that don't show up in RIMM pricing. That would be stuff like advertising, fancy packaging, etc. RIMM and DIMM pricing is very close to RDRAM and SDRAM pricing. The reason is that companies that sell RDRAM also sell RIMMs, so RIMMs hasn't gone through any more hands than RDRAMs. (And the specialty RIMM or DIMM manufacturers are high volume low margin businesses not at all comparable to the kind of companies that engineers making cost calculations, of the sort I described, would work at. RIMMs and DIMMs require very little R&D, marketing, sales, software, technical support, advertising &c., compared to graphics boards.
-- Carl |
