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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (544753)	1/18/2010 7:41:32 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574258

"Low-volume government projects don't contribute to this" They weren't low volume projects. Minuteman, if nothing else, was a pretty large run, some 800 missiles total. They did manage to get the chips costs down from about $1k a chip to $25 a chip, which made it feasible for commercial use. So you are just making this up. "When you're selling a million or 20 million calculators you quickly recover the costs of embedded systems. " Now you are talking about LSI and later. That wasn't for another decade. More before they reached million plus volume. "When you're doing custom development for a few one-offs, not so much." Those weren't custom chips in those days. We are talking SSI, which had maybe 2 dozen transistors in a package. Basic gates. And it took a bunch to make the nav. computer for Minuteman I.