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100% sure - once you have the masks, pumping out chips is cheap, if you do it in volume. http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/semiconductor-economics-101/ http

• nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Key quotes: "Super complex SOC platforms like Apple’s Ax family or the IBM Cell very likely exceeded $1B in total development costs and involved thousands of engineers in aggregate." "Meanwhile relatively simple SOCs like the Epiphany family of chips were designed for less than $3M over the span of 3 years.[1,2]" And Adapteva did such a good job being cheaper than average they wrote a [different] blog post about how they went about it. So, the low end was $3 million over 3 years while users wanting to ditch proprietary are asking for price/performance/watts closer to the above quote that cost $1 billion. Hence, my prediction it will take millions to tens of millions to make something acceptable. Also, me pushing Cavium's model of RISC multicore + HW accelerators for common things. I think it will help by taking load (& optimization) off the main CPU's. Now, people doing analog stuff have it a lot easier given even 350nm is often good for that. That stuff can get really cheap: http://www.planetanalog.com/author.asp?section_id=526&doc_id=559519 http://www.planetanalog.com/author.asp?section_id=526&doc_id...