"Greg A. Woods" wrote:
> 
> [ On Friday, April 12, 2002 at 11:24:43 (-0700), Justin Wojdacki wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: NetBSD without MMU ?
> >
> > As dumb as it may sound, there are cases where a couple of cents (US)
> > per chip can make a difference in whether or not a sale is made (note
> > that I'm talking about volumes in the 1e6's of chips).
> 
> Even with millions of units sold will the additional engineering costs
> required to get a system complex enough to need something like a NetBSD
> kernel, and whatever application code will be used, running reliabily on
> an MMU-less system, not vastly outweigh the few cents per chip savings?

No, because they are one-time costs.

> (obvioulsy there's a break-even point after which the savings are real,
> but if we're talking about millions of units and pennies per unit, then
> that's not a trivial back of the envelope calculation!  ;-)

Correct, but in many engineering organizations one-time engineering
costs are not considered to be part of the cost of the product.  Yes,
it's completely amazing, but it's true.  The division of Philips I worked
for had a product that was about 10% hardware content and 90% software,
but they sold the hardware and gave away the software because software
had no "cost" associated with it.  The division had 4 hardware engineers
and 50 software engineers, but software was free.  Go figure.

Remember, it doesn't have to make sense as long as an MBA figured it up.

-- 
            "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"

Wes Peters                                                         Softweyr LLC
wes@softweyr.com                                           http://softweyr.com/