The iPhone, of course, is more than the sum of its parts, but the cost of individual components adds up--to $178.96, to be exact.
A new analysis by iSuppli details the cost of the iPhone 3GS and the motley collection of chips inside.
The entry-level (16GB) version of the iPhone 3GS carries a BOM (bill of materials) cost of $172.46 and a manufacturing expense of $6.50, for a total of $178.96, said Andrew Rassweiler, director and principal analyst, teardown services, for iSuppli, in a statement.
Apple iPhone 3GS major components and cost drivers
(Credit: iSuppli)Service providers are paying more for the low-end iPhone 3G S than the original iPhone 3G, according to Rassweiler. "Although the retail price of the 16GB iPhone 3GS is $199, the same as for the 8GB version of the original iPhone 3G, the actual price of the phone paid by the service provider is considerably higher, reflecting the common wireless industry practice of subsidizing the upfront cost of a mobile phone and then making a profit on subscriptions," he said.
And what are the major cost drivers? The 16GB flash memory chip is the priciest at $24--and reflects the rising cost of flash chips due to supply constraints, according to iSuppli. This part is also available from Samsung. So there could be some second-sourcing (sourcing the part from a second chip supplier) in the future.
The next rung in the cost ladder is the 3.5-inch display module and touch-screen assembly, at $19.95 and $16, respectively.
Below this, is the main Samsung applications processor. Priced at $14.46, it is the fourth most costly component in the iPhone 3GS. ... Read more
Netbooks using ARM's next-generation processor architecture will be announced soon, according to a senior executive at the company.
Rob Coombs, director of mobile solutions at the U.K. processor design company, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that Cortex-A8- and Cortex-A9-based application processors would find their way not only into smartphones--as with most ARM architecture--but also into small, low-cost subnotebooks.
"In the future, we're going to be in Netbooks," Coombs said. "Expect announcements in the next few months."
... Read more
(Credit:
Cortex Design)
If you read Crave regularly, chances are you've got at least one gadget fetish; we, of course, have many. But there's one in particular that even we can't explain: keyboards. Not just any types, mind you, but exceedingly complicated ones, which are often expensive as well.
The "Terpstra" from Cortex Design is a MIDI keyboard controller that looks more like an unraveled beehive than a piece of studio equipment. Its 280 keys are "velocity sensitive," which supposedly gives it more control flexibility in handling microtonal music, according to Gizmowatch. Take that, Optimus Maximus.
Two weeks after Intel signaled its future low-power intentions, ARM has unveiled its latest mobile chip design for smart phones and consumer devices that will arrive around 2010.
ARM CEO Warren East, left, and marketing executive John Goodacre discuss the launch of the Cortex A9 at the ARM Developers Conference.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)The Cortex A9 is an extension of the Cortex family of applications processor cores that ARM unveiled two years ago with the Cortex A8. It combines the multiprocessor support of older ARM cores with the Cortex design, ARM's highest-performance implementation to date. Several ARM partners, such as Texas Instruments, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Nvidia and NEC Electronics also announced plans to use the Cortex A9 in future chips for smart phones and consumer electronics devices.
ARM, based in Cambridge, England, doesn't actually make chips. It designs processor cores that companies like TI and Samsung use in smart phones made by Nokia and Apple, respectively. There's an ARM core in more than 90 percent of the mobile phones in the world, and in many cases there are several ARM designs inside your phone.
"The ARM world is growing a lot faster than the economy as a whole, and the semiconductor industry as a whole," said Warren East, ARM's CEO, in a press conference Wednesday at the ARM Developers Conference. Smart phones aren't nearly as prevalent as PCs, but they are growing much stronger than their larger cousins, and ARM is the predominant chip architecture used in those phones.
As a result, Intel wants a piece of this market as it evolves. At some point down the road, either smart phones are going to become more sophisticated, or minitablet PCs are going to become sleeker and offer better battery life. Both Intel and ARM are positioning themselves to be inside future mobile computers, and each brings different strengths to the table.
ARM's John Goodacre, program manager for multiprocessing, said mobile chip makers will be able to implement up to four processing cores with the Cortex A9. He doesn't anticipate that smart phones even around the end of the decade will need that much performance, considering that PC customers today are having trouble justifying four cores. But embedded devices like in-car processors and networking gear, where ARM customers also build chips, will be at those levels in 2010 or thereabouts.
In the most powerful configuration, Cortex A9 chips should be able to deliver up to 8,000 DMIPS (dhrystone million instructions per second) of performance with power consumption of around 250 milliwatts. DMIPS is an older measure of integer performance that's mainly used these days for embedded chips that don't run nearly the amount of code that PC and server chips have to handle, so it's difficult to judge exactly how much performance that is compared with a modern-day PC processor from Intel or AMD.
But 250 milliwatts of power consumption is far below what the most power-sensitive PC chips are capable of delivering these days, and devices with ARM chips are already at that level today. The ARM11 core, which is the basis for the Samsung applications processor used in the iPhone, has around that level of power consumption.
Intel hopes to get well below a watt with its Silverthorne processor, due out next year. And in 2010 it plans to ship a processor called Moorestown that will probably compete directly against the Cortex A9 for design wins in future smart phones or MIDs, Intel's vision of the future of mobile computing.
In fact, Digitimes reported Wednesday that Apple is considering replacing the ARM-based Samsung chip currently found in the iPhone with Moorestown once the product is ready. Intel has released little information about Moorestown, other than to say it wants to dramatically reduce the power consumption of its products by the time that arrives around 2010.
UPDATE: An ARM representative pointed out that the Cortex A8 was actually the first Cortex applications processor for products like smart phones. The first Cortex processor was the Cortex M3, designed for networking gear and other embedded devices.
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