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Intel has competitors. Why would Intel want to provide its competitors with what must be, at the very least, tens of millions of dollars worth of work?
by marcoperaza 11y ago
Intel has competitors. Why would Intel want to provide its competitors with what must be, at the very least, tens of millions of dollars worth of work?
- nickpsecurity 11y agoYou have the right idea but it's way more that you think. Intel spends over a billion dollars per quarter on all their tech. https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/r_and_d_expense https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/r_and_d_expense I agree R&D on any given bit of HW design is at least tens of millions. Probably more than once per year going back a decade given it's custom and formally verified. Standard cell approximating that would be a fraction of it but still ridiculously high if aiming for competitive performance/watt.
- marcoperaza 11y agoYeah, Intel is one of the biggest companies in the world. I was just speculating an absolute floor for just the microcode in particular.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoYou're the second person to bring up microcode. I'm curious why two are focused on this rather than the HW itself. What about you? Note: For readers not in the know, microcode is the sequence of wiring activations of the physical, closed hardware. Instructions, merely series of bits, get translated to that by the microcode engine running from a memory rather than hardwired engine. Unlike the ISA, it's highly tied to the hardware since it drives it directly.
- marcoperaza 11y agoI'm not focused on this, it was an example used in the post I responded to.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoOh OK