[Arm-netbook] ppcnotebook

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 6:18 AM, Christopher Havel
<laserhawk64 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure if you're talking to me or Luke... if it's me, the only
> product line of Intel's that I'm interested in is now a ghost... namely the
> Atom SoCs, like the Z3735F, which they stupidly killed off

 stupidly yes

> because

 .. they don't care if they're cloned: intel makes money selling the
SoCs if they're cloned or not-cloned.

 no the reason is: they make a specific batch of the processors,
making it a large batch so that they can tune one of the wafer
manufacturing machines over a period of several months to get it up to
as close to a 100% yield as they can, then stockpile them.

 remember this is intel trying its hand at what it thinks is
*mass-volume* marketing.

 when that lot runs out, they have a choice:

 (1) make some more (and by "more" i mean '10 to 100 million") - again
starting the entire tuning process from scratch because it's unlikely
to be the exact same machines or conditions

 (2) recognise that the SoC is by now hopelessly out of date, and
would totally fail to sell even if it was done at a good yield, so can
it completely.

this is how it works.  you can't just turn on the tap on these
foundries and out pops a working set of wafers with 5,000 fully
working ICs 100% on every wafer.  the first wafers are hopelessly poor
yield: 10 to 25% if you're extremely lucky.  it's only by slowly
working out what's wrong that you can fine-tune the machine in a
hundred different ways to get the yields up, and that literally takes
months.

 so to get the best return on profit with these mass-produced SoCs you
have to take an enormous risk each time and make several million.

 now, for the LONG TERM processors it's a totally different matter.
those intel puts out at something insane like a 5 to 10 times markup.
and that markup covers the poor yields involved in restarting a
production run.