Last year, AMD launched the Ryzen Rui Long processor, after years from finally returned to the high-performance processor market, the performance of the previous generation FX processor has improved significantly, coupled with good price / performance, that AMD will be able to turn around in 2017 Surplus.
Intel has been ridiculed here for many years to squeeze toothpaste upgrade, especially in recent years, process technology has been stuck in the 14nm node, Skylake architecture after almost no escalation, 6th and 7th generation and now 8 generations are true.
However, ridicule go ridicule, to know that high-performance processor R & D is a burning job, 6 generations of Corela Skylake, 7 generations of core Kabylake addition to processor development costs more than 71, 70000000000 dollars, this tube toothpaste is not cheap.
Intel Core i7 7700K
We all know that China is vigorously promoting the development of the semiconductor industry. Companies such as Huawei and Spreadtrum have made advances in mobile processors such as ARM. However, the gap between us and other countries is still high-performance processors. The X86 is not licensed as an ARM The threshold is very high.
China now X86 field In addition to AMD authorized Tianjin Haiguang Investment Company, the rest is the Shanghai Siu-core companies, their technology comes from VIA VIA Inc., which is AMD, Intel's third company with X86 authorized, However, the strength of the VIA two places far worse, craft, architecture are far behind.
The successor to the VIA mantle of Shanghai Katherine core company recently introduced the KX-5000 series processors, they described in detail their difficulties in the development process and achievements, but this is not the focus of this article is interesting that they announced Some processor R & D-related data, such as CPU R & D investment in this area.
At present, they give examples of ARM, AMD, Intel, Apple, IBM and Huawei. For example, the ARM processor cost R & D of $ 349 million in 2016, which is relatively low. However, the ARM model is different from other companies. Mainly to do the design and program, the processor manufacturer to buy the ARM's authorization, or to their own research and development of the second design.
Really want to do processor research and development on their own very burn, Apple's R & D investment in 2016 about 10 billion US dollars, IBM also has 5.75 billion US dollars, AMD also has 1 billion US dollars, while Intel R & D costs more to reach in 2016 12.7 billion U.S. dollars
In their case, Huawei also spent $ 76.2 billion on R & D in 2016. However, Huawei's R & D investment is not for a processor project, so the total investment is great. However, it is not clear what the specific chip R & D expenses will be anyway Very low, after all, this is a burning job.
Katherine also announced the cost of these companies to develop specific processors, ARM A73 architecture research and development cycle of about 1 year, cost 324 million pounds, about 420 million US dollars.
X86 processor burn more, Core architecture 10.6 years ago also to 34.6 billion US dollars, each generation of processors after also have 34 billion US dollars, to 22nm process Haswell processor, the cost rose to 6.6 billion US dollars , Six generations of Corelane Skylake processors to 71 billion US dollars, 7 generations of Kaby Lake have 70 billion US dollars - you ridicule Intel toothpaste all day, did not expect this pipe toothpaste so expensive.
Because AMD has no semiconductor factory, processor research and development costs are much less, but Zen processor still needs 3.12 billion dollars, less than half of Intel processor, but taking into account the size of AMD's revenue, the cost is not low. IBM's Power processor R & D costs much lower, on average more than a dozen two billion dollars.
However, here to note is that the core also did not announce the source of these data, the actual cost of research and development to be much more complex, such as Intel's annual investment of more than 120 billion R & D investment, a large part of R & D process into technology, from 6 generations of Core to 7 On behalf of Core Duo changes, Intel can not just invested 7 billion US dollars in research and development on the structure.
