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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (27473)	1/1/1998 12:48:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576323

Paul, Ethernet card for a home computer? Of course once on the board the parts counts if under $5 for a slow one, and with DSP they can get a modem in there real cheap as well. I was curious about the hard drive size, the memory size, as they affect the finalprice. Easy to make a 4 meg system with 250 Meg IDE. I would consider a minimum of 16 Meg and at least 1 gig hard drive. But they are getting close to the bottom. I would suspect that a CPU will be under $35 next year by July, and the DRAM will turn another corner by them and they will be able to use 2 64M chips on board to make 16M and save the SIM socket and fees to wang as well. I would have to do a spreadsheet cost, but with no I/O slots they save on those and the buffers and it can be made really cheaply. I would say, Modem/ethernet card, $20-25 Max, VGA card, $20, CPU $35. 16M $30. Chip set, $20, misc parts $20 and PC Board $10. 1.44 floppy $17 CDROM 20X, $45, Poswer supply(low wattage) $15 Keyboard $12, Case $10, Built in monitor, SVGA, $130 , 1 Gig hard drive $150. Assembly $50 + $589, or I waould say from $550 to $600 is about the bottom possible price for the next 6 months. And you say they sell it for $899. Thats is a lot of margin. Of course if the monitor is separate it costs more, and if they have edge connectors costs more, etc. The economics for a screwdriver shop are about $100 higher due to smaller volums, standard case, separate monitor, larger power supply, and a standard motherboard shape with edge connectors etc. But Compaq has its costs of sales marketing and distribution that are at least the same as the extra the screwdriver shops pay, and could be higher. The only way they can do it is to make a non expandable zero option box, but the screwdriver shops will stay with them all the way. The funny thing is will the total market $$ amount fall, even as the box numbers hit the roof? Bill