can someone explain this?

[TOMPPIX]

can someone explain to me why we the customers haven't seen a decrease in price as the transistors got smaller. i remember sandy bridge as being the cheapest, then the prices just kept on going up. why?

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/technology/smaller-faster-cheaper-over-the-future-of-computer-chips.html

[stefanDB]

well, each individual transistor has become cheaper, but there are many more transistors on a modern CPU than on the old ones. also, AMD wasn't very competetive for a while so intel inflated the prices. but the price/performance ratio of modern hardware is better.

[Cajmo]

Because they are adding more of these smaller transistors.

 

**First Post**

[lieder1987]

3 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

can someone explain to me why we the customers haven't seen a decrease in price as the transistors got smaller. i remember sandy bridge as being the cheapest, then the prices just kept on going up. why?

because business. WHy would they lower the price of the their products when the consumer is still willing to pay at that price. If it comes to a point when they see a loss in sales, then they will lower prices. Companies invest in things to save money, not to save you money.

[Rohime]

5 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

can someone explain to me why we the customers haven't seen a decrease in price as the transistors got smaller. i remember sandy bridge as being the cheapest, then the prices just kept on going up. why?

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/technology/smaller-faster-cheaper-over-the-future-of-computer-chips.html

The price PER TRANSISTOR is waaaayyyyyy lower then it used to be.

Just lots more of them.

[mariushm]

Making new factories for the new processes costs hundreds of millions of dollars

Upgrading old factories to new factories or adding production lines in parallel to older production lines costs more and more - the lower you go the harder it is to upgrade and you have to just go for making new factory from scratch (new buildings, new everything)

 

You get smaller chips and you get more chips per wafer (round disc from which chips are cut and then put in packages) but the company which made the factory has to recover the money. Also, at least for a few months after a factory is made, there's still optimizations and tuning of the production line, which means the factory may produce a high percentage of faulty chips. 

The prices drop as the process is optimized and a larger percentage of chips come out right (with time), and the company recuperates the money invested in the new factory.

 

The factories for older processes are already paid for so the companies can afford to ask for less money to manufacture chips just to keep those employees and the production lines occupied, so that can make new factories seem more expensive if you do direct comparison with older processes.

 

 

[agent_x007]

Because :
1) Transisors aren't getting cheaper (at least with old 2Y process longevity on 16-14nm and smaller).
2) No price wars (and competition), for Intel after 2011 till now.
3) Making actual money is more important than getting transistors as cheap as possible.

[TOMPPIX]

4 minutes ago, Rohime said:

The price PER TRANSISTOR is waaaayyyyyy lower then it used to be.

Just lots more of them.

yeah and the rx 480 has 5.7 billion of them and the i7 6950x has 3.2 billion.

[agent_x007]

2 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

yeah and the rx 480 has 5.7 billion of them and the i7 6950x has 3.2 billion.

RX GPU's transistors : <2GHz clock.
Broadwell CPU's transistors : 4,5GHz+ clock.
Because of that, you can't compare them directly.

[mariushm]

1 minute ago, TOMPPIX said:

yeah and the rx 480 has 5.7 billion of them and the i7 6950x has 3.2 billion.

But it's different layouts .. video cards are made out of tiny cores which have a very small footprint and then that footprint is repeated hundreds of times and if for some reason one such core is damaged they can disable it.

Processors have more complex structures and a lot of other bigger things (larger level 1 and level 2 and even level 3 caches) and they're higher frequency stuff ... ex video card chips barely reach 1600-1800 Mhz while processors can reach 4-5 Ghz.

 

 

[mariushm]

Another thing i wanted to add...

 

The lower you go in manufacturing process, the more expensive is to get software capable of designing such chips and to get everything required to manufacture a chip done.

 

For example, for something simpler than a processor, for example let's say a chipset.., it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to convert an existing design to a lower process, to prepare the layout that would be sent to factory and to test it.

 

That's why you don't see chipsets made on 14-16 nm, you still have chipsets made on 65nm (the amd fx series) or 55 nm in the case of AM4 and Ryzen ... intel may have some chipsets on 45nm but i can't be bothered to check.

It's not worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to shrink a chipset just to save half a watt in power consumption when the overall footprint of the chip on the motherboard would still have to be large (due to the huge number of contacts/pins on the bottom of a chipset) and when nobody really cares how the chipset is made (as long as it has overclocking capability , or that it supports sli or not etc. Motherboard manufacturers wouldn't be interested in paying extra money just for very small costs.

 

This is pretty much the same reason you don't see companies like Realtek jumping on 14/16 nm to make their onboard audio or network chips on lower processes - the investment in converting existing designs to lower process and the extra cost per die due to new process is not worth it for them