Question about production costs

peteroy

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Is the production of processors like Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 is cheaper than what was the production of processors like Pentium 2 and K6?

In 1997 the waffer were 0.25mm and today it's 0.90mm and even though they added more transistors I think it might be cheaper for them than it used to be in 1997.

I'm asking this because I wonder if Intel and AMD keep the prices today as they were in 1997 because people find the prices reasonable even though Intel and AMD could lower the prices of processors today.

A company wouldn't lower prices when the production gets cheaper if sales are good and get better each year.

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peteroy

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Someone on Anandtech gave me a great link about exactly what I am trying to say here

<A HREF="http://www.overclockers.com/tips00820/" target="_new">Read</A>

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endyen

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When you talk about cost of production going down, you are forgetting a key component. It should be cost per transistor.
When you talk about .25mm chips, you are talking about <25 milion transistors as well. The latest chips have 10X as many transistors, but sure dont cost 10X the $.
I'm old. I remember people dropping $2500 to $5000 for a basic computer, nothing special.
Sure Intel is taking 50 cents on the $ as profit, but that is actually low for them. Yes, chip prices are a little high right now, compared to a couple of years ago, but Intel has had to artifically inflate prices because they needed the extra $ for R&D.
The Graphics card market is a different story. Nvidia used to have the whole market tied up, so fixed costs could be spread over greater numbers of chips. Now, thier market share is way down, so those costs have to be spread over fewer cards. Of course, if you want cheep graphics, you can always go integrated. The price for that is at a very low level, for what you get.