The price will be very high, but the vector unit isn't the reason at all. These target a very specialized market and they won't be selling billions of them lik

The price will be very high, but the vector unit isn't the reason at all. These target a very specialized market and they won't be selling billions of them like they do with other PIC designs. If a specialized chip costs $250M to get past all the red tape and out the door and you expect to sell 200k in the first couple years, your costs are going to be high (and you aren't going to wait any longer than that to pay off your R&D costs). Once the chip is fabbed, your post-fab requirements are also going to be very high and all that extra verification adds even more money to the process. If there are plans to sell these in something like a nuke plant, they'll also need a completely verified supply chain which drives up costs astronomically (when my father worked at one, a simple bolt that would cost you $0.10 at a hardware store would cost $100 due to all the chain of custody bureaucracy costs). While the chip is cutting edge year 1, by the time it's moving into year 5, it will be a commodity that must compete on price rather than being the latest and greatest. By year 10-30 (or whenever their support and supply guarantee contracts are ending), the big costs become maintenance. You have minimum amount of people you pay to sit around on support which costs millions per year. You have to keep around all the verification processes and people for the occasional chip order too (small wafer runs are expensive if they have to be done and if you're forced to do one after 20-30 years the old fabs and their process might not even exist requiring you to deal with all the bureaucracy of getting the design updated to the new process, getting new verification created and approved, etc). I'd be very surprised if these chips were under $5000 each and wouldn't be at all surprised if they were $10k or more.