Xilinx Spartan3: Price

they are both correct.. check the volumes field on the Xilinx web site.. its probably 250,000

Yes. Take a look at the * at the bottom of this page:

Well, if he can team up with 250 of us and make an order of 1000 each as a single group we could get the $12 (I guess that is the lowest speed grade in the cheapest packet).

Petter

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A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

Just some perspective: When I joined Xilinx 16 years ago, the price per LUT was about $1.00 Today it is hundred times lower, at around $ 0.01 And we are promising another factor 10 in the near future. Not too bad ! BlockRAMs and multipliers and DCMs are thrown in "for free".

BTW, the 3S1000 has about 16 000 LUTs. You do the math.

Peter Alfke

:> they are both correct.. check the volumes field on the Xilinx web site.. its :> probably 250,000

: Yes. Take a look at the * at the bottom of this page:

:

: Well, if he can team up with 250 of us and make an order of 1000 each : as a single group we could get the $12 (I guess that is the lowest : speed grade in the cheapest packet).

If everyone of this team of 250 could contribute one day of lead time we could also get in a time frame where the parts are really available on the market :-)

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Uwe Bonnes                bon@elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de

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One minute per team member would be sufficient. :-) Peter Alfke

I Just wonder why the price drops so much between 250k and 1k.

1k @$200 = $200k 250k @$ 12 = $3,000k

So he really only needs to find 16 or more people that want 1k to get a discount, and as a bonus he gets many thousands of free chips.

if he could just find 25 people they would all be buying their 1k @ $120 each and getting 9k free chips.

Why not $50 @ 1k?

Ralph

Now I'm starting to understand why I'm such a lousy businessman :-(

Petter

--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

Ralph,

It is also called "forward pricing" because it lets a customer know what it will cost when they finally go into production a year or so from now.

A real customer doesn't care what it costs right now, because 'right now' is not when they are going to sell anything. They want to know what it will cost when they go into production (along with all of their competitors). Until then, they need to budget for the costs, but they are not at all as concerned about the short terem, as they are about when it is selling, and they are trying to squeeze the best out of the (potentially thin) margins.

For example, if I know I want to hit the market next Christmas with a new GPS videogame/handheld/FRS personnal communicator/802.11g (call it Internet Enabled Star Treck Cache Dragon Hunt*), and I wish to sell 250K units for $29.95, I need to make the BOM today, get pricing locked in, and be sure that when I go to build them, I can turn a profit.

The one off price today, or next month is of no value to anyone who is really in business (other than to let you know how much to write the check for).

Austin

*Game is not patented, or registered, but since I just made it public domain, I do expect to see three versions of it by next fall. The unit would automatically register you on a website as a player, find other players in your area, assign local FRS channels and tones to the players as teams ("red vs. blue"), and then send GPS coordinates for "caches" that must be reached before certain time limits in order to score points. Once you have arrived at a cache point, the unit verifies its location, and gets going you off to the next one.

Ralph Mas>

is

cost

Nitpicking, but, companies like mine are "real customers" yet we only need a few hundred or thousand devices for production ... not hundreds of thousands.

I've always thought that semiconductor pricing was unfairly skewed to favor the big guys. I understand discount structures, etc., but there's a huge difference between $200 and $12. And, it's weird, 'cause you'd think that you'd sell a ton more chips if the little guys could buy them at a more affordable price point.

I've been dealing with a semiconductor manufacturer that's been downright rude about discounts because they were the only game in town. Now, with Virtex 2 Pro's high speed serial I/O capabilities I have a chance to drop them like a hot potato in my next design. The likelyhood of that happening is extremely high at this point. I'm sure they bend over backwards for those who move more chips, but, what they don't realize (even though I've explained it), is that I'm ramping up. They are literally handing Xilinx business to the tune of thousands of V2P's per year. Very unwise.

So, the high cost of chips for the sub 1K/year crowd might very well make them look elsewhere and, as you can imagine, once you adopt and get comfortable with another vendor the chances of getting a different chip onto that a board are pretty low.

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Which really is a contradiction to Austins post who essentially explained the price difference with a 6 Month delay before purchase.

You are suggesting that in 250 Minutes the 250k price is going to drop to 12$ but I doubt that the Avnet price is going to drop today.

So there would be a factor of 16 volume discount compared to a 1k price. I believe you agree that this is unusual?

Kolja Sulimma

If I was buying 250k units.. I would be knocking on Peters door not Avnet's.. when your interested in real volumes you don't have the cash to waste on middle men.

Sim> > > If everyone of this team of 250 could contribute one day of lead time

we

on the

Kolja, let's maintain some common sense here. I only commented on Uwe's doubt about availability (250 days), and I countered with "250 minutes", actually much less than that, since the

3S1000J has been available for weeks. BTW: "J"only refers to a of 3.3-V tolerance, to be fixed in the final release.

This whole discussi>

Well, that is all in how much you push your distributors. Right now they are hungry and they all want to lock in design wins on the new parts. I have gotten a very agressive price on the XC3S400 and I am asking about the XC3S1000 since I may need a few more LUTs to support modular configuration. I expect I will be getting close to that 10x figure Peter mentioned. My XC3S400 price was within a factor of 3 of that.

Rick "rickman" Collins

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