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Comment by tostitos1979 | Hacker News Reader

tostitos1979·

Agreed. If you look at A11, a huge portion of the chip is cache. 8MB L2 IIRC. The belief is that they (Apple) take a hit on the CPU and make it up in the full device. Can't do that if you don't make the full device.

(Just my personal opinion)

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This seems reasonable, but whenever I see a cost breakdown of iPhones the CPU doesn't seem ridiculously expensive. Not sure if the cost breakdowns are wrong or what.

Yea I don't see how anyone can come up with an accurate cost for Apple's custom chips. I think what actually happens is that the analysts just say "Qualcom's chip costs $30 so Apple's is probably about the same."

The die size is known because the chips get decapped, the cost per square mm of silicon is known, the packaging and test costs are known, sure they have to estimate Apple's volume discount, but in terms of the physical chip itself pretty much all the bases are covered.

qualcomm benefits from having one of the first, and continue to have integrated LTE modem.

that is an additional cost on iphone if you are comparing cpu to cpu pricing (which there isnt really any details on the A11 costs).

not sure what the LTE and wifi modem costs on iphone, but its included cost with qualcomm cpu

Actually it's pretty easy, just take the die size and punch it in to the 300mm wafer calculator, estimate the yield, use the going estimate for TSMC wafers, and you have your number (very accurate also).

Well there are ARM laptops that cost 500$, and they're still not super fast.

And most of them are using even cheaper Rockchip SoCs. But that makes sense. $500 laptops don't seem like they would be high margin.

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