The Cost of Embedded Production
The Cost of Embedded Production
Posted Dec 3, 2005 18:33 UTC (Sat) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)Parent article: LinkSys courts Linux hackers with WRT54GL (LinuxDevices)
Nearly 10 years ago, I worked for a company that had written a browser that hoped to get bought up by a big company like Oracle or Microsoft.. when that didnt work out.. they found that writing a browser for set-top boxes, PS2, medical monitors, and hand-held devices might save the company... but in order to do that, they needed to send a lot of desktop memory/CPU hungry programmers, qa, and marketing people to a boot-camp for them to deal with a world where memory cant be upgraded, cpu is usually 10 years behind the times, and a core dump can mean that their Mom died in hospital.
The main things I remember from the boot-camp were that every computerized product has at least the following costs when a company decides to market something:
Upstream Licensing Costs
Development Costs
Quality Assurance Costs
Maintenance Costs
Marketing Costs
Hardware Costs
And while the costs per units were usually seen in 1-5 dollar sizes.. the numbers of units that would be manufactured at a time went from 10,000 to 1,000,000 units. The second issue was that embedded hardware have fixed sales prices that are usually much lower than shelf price (usually on the order of 10-20%). So a 50.00 Linksys router means a 5.00-10.00 to Cisco/Linksys after you cover the 20% Best Buy gets, the 40% the middle men get and the various shipping and storage costs that take 20-30%. [Which is why you can buy a semi-black market linksys in Taiwan for $10-$15] That meant that costs have to be contained to that 5.00 a unit.
While Linux has a zero/unit licensing cost, its development, qa and maintenance costs are higher than the fixed VxWorks costs which basically bundles all that together in their finished licensed product. Cisco also probably has a large fixed contract with VxWorks so the costs are cut across every Cisco product versus just the Linksys.
Second embedded hardware costs do not go as nX but can go from X^2 to X^n. Doubling the amount of ram in a system can quadruple or sextuple the price of parts being used.. depending on extra power consumption, testing, parts, size of product, etc. Being able to cut back a CPU clock speed can increase reliability which cut maintenance costs.
If anything.. this should help spur Linux hackers more. You need to figure out a way to use a smaller cpu, memory footprint than the current VxWorks and offer more features (or better reliability with the features that exist).