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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!rmariani
From: rmariani@watnot.UUCP (Rico Mariani)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Memory Board Costs
Message-ID: <11413@watnot.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 27-Jan-86 12:34:33 EST
Article-I.D.: watnot.11413
Posted: Mon Jan 27 12:34:33 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 28-Jan-86 05:13:43 EST
References: <1099@ecsvax.UUCP> <11403@watnot.UUCP> <550@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: rmariani@watnot.UUCP (Rico Mariani)
Distribution: net
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 59
Keywords: COMSPEC, memory board
Summary: 

In article <550@well.UUCP> farren@well.UUCP (Mike Farren) writes:
>In article <11403@watnot.UUCP>, rmariani@watnot.UUCP (Rico Mariani) writes:
>> matter?) with no parity checking and no wait states.  Well actually
>> that's not *quite* true, if you try to access the same memory that is
>> being refreshed then the CPU may see as many as 3 wait states.  From
>> what I understand, this happens very infrequently.  As for expandability,
>  
>  It shouldn't happen infrequently, it should happen not at all.  The design
>of the 68000 allows refresh to be interleaved invisibly with the memory
>accesses (look at how the coprocessors in the AMIGA work), so you should
>NEVER have to resort to wait states for refresh!  If there ARE wait states,
>I wonder about the design...

I'm not sure exactly why this was necessary, but I'll try to find out and I'll
get back to you on that...

>> Now for the bad news, the price.  It is going to be somewhere in the
>> $1000-$1500 range (not $800 as mentioned before).
> 
>   Let's see...  2Meg = 72 256K rams @ $2.50 each -  180.00
>                 Support chips (liberal)          -   40.00
>                 PC board and case                -   25.00
> for a total of $245 manufacturing cost.  Given a 3 to 1 markup (not
>atypical) that's a cost of about $750 that I would expect to see.  $1500
>for 2Meg with current chip costs is a rip-off!

There are some problems with your pricing...

a) you haven't added anything to do with Labour...
   i) assembly
  ii) testing

b) your pricing on the PC board is a bit on the low side

c) cost of memory just went up by 20%  (apparently Japanese sources bumped
   their prices, so US sources followed suit, I could be wrong on this...)

d) You're thinking in U.S. Dollars, my prices are all in Canadian

	Cost with labour in $USA is closer to $350
	Markup (* 3 if you like)    $1050
	What's the Canadian Dollar worth? Well add 40% anyway ... $1470

Does that look more reasonable to you?  I hope so...

By the way, I didn't say the board sells for $1500, I said it would be
in the $1000 to $1500 ballpark.  However, looking at these figures my hopes
of a cheap board are diminishing... 

Also, I am told that the circuitry to do the automatic system configuration
is relatively complicated, this could add to the cost of the support chips, that
also makes this price seem much nicer.

I'll try to post more details later...

	Lo Song
	 -Rico

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