Thoughts on software-defined silicon

Thoughts on software-defined silicon

> So the fact that you can just sell the fully-loaded die as an "economy" SKU means that you don't have competitors that would just undercut you on price or features.

Nope. You are forgetting an elephant in the room: price of set of photolithography masks and design cost for these masks. To make one set of masks you have to spend millions of dollars (singular millions). But to develop completely new set price can go to $100 million for relatively small chips and I wouldn't be surprised to know that with monsters like AMD/nVidia/Intel are producing they can go to $1 billion or more.

When non-recurring costs are so high it may make sense to produce transistors which are destined to be disabled and it would still be cheaper than to produce many physically different SKUs.

Nope. As price of development grows higher and higher and relative cost of unused silicone lower and lower more and more companies would want to do that.

That's simple math.

I don't know under what kind of rock you were sitting, but just recall that endless disable/enable AVX512 saga: apparently it's cheaper for Intel to go with already prepared masks and just disable AVX512 in firmware rather then redo the production process!

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