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From: mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: World's Cheapest Unix Engine
Message-ID: <31905@cup.portal.com>
Date: 20 Jul 90 04:13:16 GMT
References: <78-3JC2@ggpc2.ferranti.com> <2748@skye.ed.ac.uk>
  <31093@cup.portal.com> <457@bench.sublink.ORG> <2329@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
  <3115@psueea.UUCP>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
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yeung@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Woodrow Yeung) says:

> I sure hope the SX is only 10% more expensive to make.  It would be pretty
> silly for Intel to put any more engineering effort in making the 386SX than
> to disable some 16 line on the 386. Thus, the 386SX chip is a more expensive
> chip, Cost = 386 + lobotomy.  

Not quite.  The SX comes in a plastic flat-pack.  The other MS-DOS CPU's
come in ceramic, so the SX should be significantly cheaper, percentage-wise,
to manufacture.

Of course, cost-of-production has nothing to do with the sale price, other
than to place a lower bound on it.