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Serious question from someone who knows jack about what goes into designing and producing silicon: in broad terms, how complicated/expensive would it be to produce something like a GameCube/Wii SoC? My understanding of the OG PS3 is that it had something like a PS2 SoC for backward compatibility, and obviously fabrication processes have advanced considerably in the nearly 20 years since then. What kind of costs are we talking about when it comes to designing and creating a fabrication process for such a chip, where you’re not designing from scratch but rather miniaturizing an existing design? Judging by the fact that they quickly stopped including them in PS3s it wasn’t worth it from a profit-driven perspective, but I’m just curious about how viable it would be in a world where we’re allowed to have nice things.
It would be cheap nowadays, the soc would be extremely tiny… however to get cost down, you would have to buy wafers in bulk, which is very expensive.
It would only be cheap iff you can find several million of people who are also willing to buy said device.
There are typically two ways to approach selling a chip, using ASIC(application specific integrated circuit), and using FPGA(field programable gate array)
ASIC has the advatage that if done in mass production, its per unit cost is very low. The requirement is that you have to make that order of mass production, which is only feasible if you have a target audience willing to buy it (e.g phone chips, new gaming consoles, gpus)
FPGA are essentially boards that can be programmed to act like a new chip. Their cost is high to start, but does not require the cost to mass produce it, making it cheaper than ASIC if you only need a small quantity.
For an economic purposes, its far cheaper just to use a modern cpu and emulate the hardware than it is to make a new line of such an old cpu. No additional hardware needed.
Serious question from someone who knows jack about what goes into designing and producing silicon: in broad terms, how complicated/expensive would it be to produce something like a GameCube/Wii SoC? My understanding of the OG PS3 is that it had something like a PS2 SoC for backward compatibility, and obviously fabrication processes have advanced considerably in the nearly 20 years since then. What kind of costs are we talking about when it comes to designing and creating a fabrication process for such a chip, where you’re not designing from scratch but rather miniaturizing an existing design? Judging by the fact that they quickly stopped including them in PS3s it wasn’t worth it from a profit-driven perspective, but I’m just curious about how viable it would be in a world where we’re allowed to have nice things.
It would be cheap nowadays, the soc would be extremely tiny… however to get cost down, you would have to buy wafers in bulk, which is very expensive.
It would only be cheap iff you can find several million of people who are also willing to buy said device.
There are typically two ways to approach selling a chip, using ASIC(application specific integrated circuit), and using FPGA(field programable gate array)
ASIC has the advatage that if done in mass production, its per unit cost is very low. The requirement is that you have to make that order of mass production, which is only feasible if you have a target audience willing to buy it (e.g phone chips, new gaming consoles, gpus)
FPGA are essentially boards that can be programmed to act like a new chip. Their cost is high to start, but does not require the cost to mass produce it, making it cheaper than ASIC if you only need a small quantity.
For an economic purposes, its far cheaper just to use a modern cpu and emulate the hardware than it is to make a new line of such an old cpu. No additional hardware needed.