Comment by freedomben
12 hours ago
I do hope you're right, but I'm quite skeptical. As mobile devices get more and more locked down, All that memory capacity gets less and less usable. I'm sure it will be accessible to Apple and Google models, but models that obey the user? Not likely
As state of the art machines continue to chase the latest node, capacity for older nodes has become much less expensive, more openly documented, and actually accessible to individuals. Open source FPGA and ASIC synthesis tools have also immensely improved in quality and capability. The Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 contains an open source Risc-V core designed by an individual. And 4G cell phones like the https://lilygo.cc/products/t-deck-pro are available on the market built around the very similar ESP32. The latest greatest will always be behind a paywall, but the rising tide floats all boats, and hobbyist projects are growing more sophisticated. Even a $1 ESP32 has dual 240mhz 32bit cores, 8Mb ram, and fast network interfaces which blow away the 8bit micros I grew up with. The state of the open-source art may be a bit behind the state of the proprietary arts, but is advancing as well.
It's really fun to have useful hardware that's easy to program at the bare metal.
Even when technically accessible to individuals it still costs at least 10k$ to get a batch of chips made on a multi project wafer.
chipfoundry.io charges $14,950 for packaged 100 chips. As far as small batch manufacturing goes, that's reasonably affordable. $149 ea. Occasionally I see better deals crop up as part of group buys or for bare dies. Presumably, one would prototype their design on an inexpensive FPGA board first, to verify functionality. So as to be reasonably sure the first batch of chips worked. Folks like Sam Zeloof are working to build new tools for one-off and small batch designs as well, which may further reduce small quantity prices.
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