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If you could identify a large population of users that could be serviced with a narrow usage scenario and they agreed to stick with their function for say a yea

If you could identify a large population of users that could be serviced with a narrow usage scenario and they agreed to stick with their function for say a year, you could build a viable solution the fixed-function way. For example, in India, PC penetration is only a few percent. Most of the population is completely technology agnostic. If you could identify the top three uses for a computing gadget for say the farmers of India, you could build a fixed function chip at low enough cost and high enough volume for them which would give them some solution instead of no solution because PCs are too expensive or consume too much power. Users such as these would probably not ask to change their gadget for years.

icebraining 14y ago
You can get an ARM system with a 700Mhz CPU, 256MB of RAM, an HD capable GPU and USB support that runs off a 300mA power supply for $25. How low could you realistically get with a custom chip?
- khitchdee 14y ago
  Much lower
  - npsimons 14y ago
    And what evidence do you have for this? We aren't talking about off-the-shelf, pennies per chip PICs here. These things would not only have to recoup the design costs (not cheap for this level of complexity), they would be expensive due to the previously mentioned huge caches (basically RAM on chip) and the fact that you really aren't going to get by with web browsing without something Turing complete.
  - khitchdee 14y ago
    For the application that I have in mind which is low cost computing alternatives for India's tech isolated millions, I think we could get by with a 320x240 resolution screen which means each frame would be pretty small and we should be able to get by with 2 frames of total buffering. At 6 gates per bit, assuming a 16 bit color depth, that would be 6 x 16 x 2 x 320 x 240 which is about 15 million gates. Assuming the rest of the chip is much smaller, and assuming we fabricate on 180 nm process means chip area is about 15million x 0.18 x .18 x 10(-6) mm squared or .5 mm sq. That's a pretty small chip. The only cost we would have to control is the design cost. Over time we could figure out how to do this with say a product line.

icebraining 14y ago

You can get an ARM system with a 700Mhz CPU, 256MB of RAM, an HD capable GPU and USB support that runs off a 300mA power supply for $25. How low could you realistically get with a custom chip?

khitchdee 14y ago
Much lower
- npsimons 14y ago
  And what evidence do you have for this? We aren't talking about off-the-shelf, pennies per chip PICs here. These things would not only have to recoup the design costs (not cheap for this level of complexity), they would be expensive due to the previously mentioned huge caches (basically RAM on chip) and the fact that you really aren't going to get by with web browsing without something Turing complete.
- khitchdee 14y ago
  For the application that I have in mind which is low cost computing alternatives for India's tech isolated millions, I think we could get by with a 320x240 resolution screen which means each frame would be pretty small and we should be able to get by with 2 frames of total buffering. At 6 gates per bit, assuming a 16 bit color depth, that would be 6 x 16 x 2 x 320 x 240 which is about 15 million gates. Assuming the rest of the chip is much smaller, and assuming we fabricate on 180 nm process means chip area is about 15million x 0.18 x .18 x 10(-6) mm squared or .5 mm sq. That's a pretty small chip. The only cost we would have to control is the design cost. Over time we could figure out how to do this with say a product line.