How much would it cost to make a CPU

[zengara]

There have been quiet a few guesses of how much it would cost to make a CPU, but there is a difference between building a computer or separating it in total and actually making a CPU

I can not find anything anywhere actually explaining this, there is only 1 youtube video, even with so many researched links, most of the conclusion is very guessing work.

 

Linus have previously talked very shortly in less than 1 sentence, explaining that the actual products made might not cost a lot, but the research/engineering team behind it did. That makes 0 sense, sorry to say. If making the actual price of the product was so bismall, why wouldn't the rival companies just push the other company out by making a 10 000$ CPU down to the already existing prices of CPU´s if the difference in making them are a few $

 

 

In short:

I rarely, if ever have used this site, but there might be some engineers or people who work for big companies like these. If I were to right now build a homemade CPU, only for me, not for others. How much would it cost? Or at the very least, is it true or false that the products themselves are not expensive

 

 

(Please do refrain from "major guessing work", I know that machines cost a lot, and I might not need them or do need them since I need to be precise, but wont have to actually make 1000000 of them before it gets profitable therefor might cheaper, the research behind it cost so more expensive but they are already out there with AMD or Intel...or that I cant since it is not realistic...."I think" etc etc..... there are already a lot of them and there wont be anything new......and annoying to scroll through them tbh, just wondered if anyone "really" knew anything about the CPU...as in worked making them, and perhaps the price of making)

[Lurick]

It would cost you in the millions or billions of dollars, you have to setup your own fab plant, have blueprints and architecture worked out, and have a way to code for that system so it can interface with a higher level operating system.

 

People cost money and you have to pay those people, thousands of people, who engineer the different facets of a product. You also have to keep paying them to keep them on the staff and keep them developing. Research and development to get smaller process nodes that are as fast as the current generation and then going a step above and beyond is even more time consuming. Intel spends YEARS working on processors before they are released. When the 9xxx series chips come out they'll probably have been in research and development for a few years at least.

 

You also have to take into cost that producing 1 chip is a lot more expensive due to defects and time and energy than paying a production plant to make a million chips and dealing with a small percentage of defective chips. You're also forgetting patents, lawyers, keeping the lights on, providing a warranty and all the other aspects that go into a business such as marketing.

[Highflow]

I guess it will start above 100.000.000 euros , machines factory personal and design

[ExplosiveSloths]

It would depend on what you class as the value of the item, the things that go into making it or just the materials required?

 

 

 

This would probably give you a good idea how complicated these things are:

 

[Lurick]

Going to put what I've said and others have said into another perspective.

Intel by themselves spent 12.78 BILLION dollars on JUST research and development in 2016 alone.

 

 

 

Couple the above with the 8.6 billion dollars they spend on marketing and general administrative expenses and they've now sunk over 20 billion dollars in costs in a single year.

[manikyath]

quite simply: you can go find the blueprints of the intel 4004 out on the internet right now if you want, but you would need millions invested before you could make that chip.

 

beyond that.. for modern stuff these blueprints are enormous (take note: transistor count is expressed in billion now), they are very specific to the methods of a given company, and they are as you would expect in a modern capitalist society: copyrighted/patented. even when a chip gets commissioned to a different fab, the ones from the other company tend to come out "just that bit different", which in something as complex as a modern cpu is nowhere near acceptable.

 

as for the actual price of an individual cpu... its fairly low, certainly nowhere near the money we pay for them. they do need a very tight tolerance substrate (the tiny green PCB your actual cpu die sits on), they need the pins or pads to be there, they need to get the die on that substrate, as for the cost of that die.. its essentially sand, which has gone trough equipment so expensive that even for multinationals developing IC's, its not uncommon to buy second hand or even "N-th hand" fabs from the bigger guys. 

 

as for designing the chip -- and the reason why they dont "just take the other guy's design and make it on the cheap": actually getting that chip on a piece of silicon and have it *WORK*. if a knockoff plastic toy is visibly different from the original, how would you imagine a knockoff cpu would be when even the company that designed them needs to "bin" them between the ones that came out better or worse.

[Theguywhobea]

As people stated before, actually having the equipment and know how to grow the wafers that CPU dies are cut from cost millions or billions of dollars already, but then you also have to factor in that these processes don't always have a very good yield, meaning that they tried to grow a big old wafer with lots of dies but almost all of them ended up bad, therefor you've gotten very little out of your rather large investment. You have to price  your chips  accordingly. I'm sure now that AMD is back in the game Intel will take a good hit to their profit margin as they now have to compete again, so I'm guessing the margins on CPU's these day's aren't huge.

[Gikero]

24 minutes ago, zengara said:

Linus have previously talked very shortly in less than 1 sentence, explaining that the actual products made might not cost a lot, but the research/engineering team behind it did. That makes 0 sense, sorry to say. If making the actual price of the product was so bismall, why wouldn't the rival companies just push the other company out by making a 10 000$ CPU down to the already existing prices of CPU´s if the difference in making them are a few $

Everything else said thus far is correct. To help you understand the "0 sense", they have to spend a ton of money to figure out how to improve all facets of a CPU. Once they've figured that out,  and the manufacturing at a very large scale, which makes each individual CPU $100-$500 depending on the part. Please note that my monetary figure is for example's sake, and not an actual price.

You asked a good question. Welcome to the forum.

[Damascus]

21 minutes ago, zengara said:

Linus have previously talked very shortly in less than 1 sentence, explaining that the actual products made might not cost a lot, but the research/engineering team behind it did. That makes 0 sense, sorry to say. If making the actual price of the product was so bismall, why wouldn't the rival companies just push the other company out by making a 10 000$ CPU down to the already existing prices of CPU´s if the difference in making them are a few $

 

 

In short:

I rarely, if ever have used this site, but there might be some engineers or people who work for big companies like these. If I were to right now build a homemade CPU, only for me, not for others. How much would it cost? Or at the very least, is it true or false that the products themselves are not expensive

Making a cpu is relatively cheap, costing mid double digits to a couple hundred bucks per cpu depending on what it is (ryzen is cheap AF to fab, i9's are much pricier)

 

The thing is, to make that cpu you need a fab that'll cost upper millions to billions to build/"rent", an engineering team and tens-hundreds of  thousands of man hours (expensive engineer man hours at that)

 

Thats why a cpu is a large markup on the cost of physical production, making the chip is only a relatively small part of the picture.

[RollinLower]

This all depends on your definition of a CPU too tough. people have made functioning computers out of LEGO and K'Nex toys.

sure, they arn;t powerfull, but they are computers with functioning central processing units.

 

as for the bare minimum cost of the plastic, gold and sillicium that goes into a CPU than sure, they are pretty cheap. but you simply cannot make a decent CPU without millions of dollars in machinery and R&D.

[LogicalDrm]

^ Going bit with above. If you want to build something that works just like CPU, you can do that with rather small investment and hundreds of hours. Just pick a platform that allows you to do pretty much anything. Lego, Minecraft and stuff like that.

 

If you want actual modern CPU, not worth it. Industry is at the point where you really need capital to even get into cheap CPU business.

[kennethnakasone]

3 hours ago, zengara said:

-snip-

Your question isn't very clear, which is likely why you're getting these speculative responses. I imagine this question is for a research report/ paper of some kind? Anyway, as a start, I would begin by clarifying whether you want to look into CPU material costs, design costs, manufacturing costs, advertisement costs, after-market support costs, etc. All of these will go into how much the end-product costs for the consumer.

 

If you want exact numbers, I would suggest hitting up companies other than the big ones. Intel and AMD are probably unlikely to answer questions (although I imagine AMD would be the more likely of the two to respond). Likewise, I doubt Qualcomm would respond to any questions. But there are plenty of other CPU manufacturers that might be more open to responding. For example, SiFive produces RISC-V processors, and they might be willing to tell you about how much it costs to send their designs to a foundry. In a similar vein, RISC-V began at UC Berkeley as an "open" CPU, so I imagine some of the participants of the project know the information you're looking for.

[zengara]

Thanks everyone for your response, read each and everyone. The theme seems to be that even if I personally had the correct blueprints (any cpu out there amd or intel), the knowledge to correctly read, understand/produce it and the time on my hand to build my own CPU. It would just still require the correct machinery, which might end up in billions