In article <c00e21$[email protected]>,
Austin Lesea <[email protected]> wrote:
>Steve,
>
>Quite frankly, I am amazed at how folks think about this. You have
>obviously never thought about that computer on your desk, and how it can
>be sold for $499! Or even your car, just go price the parts
>individually some time.

I've often priced the parts for building a computer, and they add up
to something within 15% of the price of buying the computer from Dell.
Moreover, the price for Intel CPUs in the shop is the same to within
about 15% as the price stated for thousand-unit quantities in their
press releases.

I believe FPGAs are comparably complicated to Intel CPUs, and I don't
think there's as much as an order of magnitude difference in production
quantity.

Is the market volatility for FPGAs that much greater?

> If you have any optimism about your business at all, it would be
> best to enter into a agreement and let the disti (and us) know where
> you think you are going, and how many you will need.

I can understand that attitude for people buying ten thousand chips;
but where do you expect people to get the experience with FPGAs that
they have with microprocessors, when state-of-the-art FPGAs are two
orders of magnitude more expensive and an order of magnitude less
convenient to acquire?

>Because they are a fair representation of the costs associated with
>small numbers of parts ordered through distribution to allow for a
>profitable business by the distis and reps.

But, again, why doesn't the same argument apply to CPUs, for which
there are half a dozen distributors in most towns, fairly happily
distributing the things for a couple of percent profit margin.

Tom