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It's cents... but consider this. Linux is run on devices embedded in just about everything. Places where even doubling from 128 to 256MB of flash ROM could seri

by leeter 6y ago

It's cents... but consider this. Linux is run on devices embedded in just about everything. Places where even doubling from 128 to 256MB of flash ROM could seriously hurt margins. So as the old saying goes.. a penny here and penny there sooner or later you're talking real money. And it is real money sometimes millions of dollars in margin.

andyjpb 6y ago
Cents is a lot of money in manufacturing. When I made consumer electronics our production team would swap parts based on cost. 1c on a million units is $10,000. They only had to save a few cents a year each to easily pay for themselves. The rest was margin for the business. Saving cents on a $80 BOM (bill of materials) may not sound like much but it really does add up when you're doing volume manufacturing.
- andyjpb 6y ago
  On the other hand, manufacturing has the general attitude that "software is free" because the incremental cost in production to make a copy is zero. Once, the production team swapped a component as part of a running change and it took a programmer nearly a month to write the new driver. I think we still came out ahead in the end but there was some worry along the way as it wasn't clear how long it was going to take.
- leeter 6y ago
  Exactly this, you can even look at the old consoles and see the same thing. They were built to a VERY specific margin and tuned for the same. There is as best I can tell no fat in any of the systems shipped except newer consoles and the original xbox. The only reason I'd say there is 'fat' in newer consoles is because they have much wider requirements than old ones do.
Dylan16807 6y ago
And if I learned anything from the recent fiasco over BIOS support for AMD's Zen 3 chips, it's that 128 megabit flash ROMs have massive availability and widespread use. That specific size is very cheap, and going above it is disproportionately expensive. And at that size, compression more than doubles what you can pack alongside the kernel.

by leeter 6y ago

andyjpb 6y ago

Cents is a lot of money in manufacturing. When I made consumer electronics our production team would swap parts based on cost. 1c on a million units is $10,000. They only had to save a few cents a year each to easily pay for themselves. The rest was margin for the business. Saving cents on a $80 BOM (bill of materials) may not sound like much but it really does add up when you're doing volume manufacturing.

andyjpb 6y ago
On the other hand, manufacturing has the general attitude that "software is free" because the incremental cost in production to make a copy is zero. Once, the production team swapped a component as part of a running change and it took a programmer nearly a month to write the new driver. I think we still came out ahead in the end but there was some worry along the way as it wasn't clear how long it was going to take.
leeter 6y ago
Exactly this, you can even look at the old consoles and see the same thing. They were built to a VERY specific margin and tuned for the same. There is as best I can tell no fat in any of the systems shipped except newer consoles and the original xbox. The only reason I'd say there is 'fat' in newer consoles is because they have much wider requirements than old ones do.

Dylan16807 6y ago

And if I learned anything from the recent fiasco over BIOS support for AMD's Zen 3 chips, it's that 128 megabit flash ROMs have massive availability and widespread use. That specific size is very cheap, and going above it is disproportionately expensive. And at that size, compression more than doubles what you can pack alongside the kernel.