Acolyte of the Butterfly
Posts: 104 from 2009/3/20
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...the embedded auto makers were the market...
where did that get from?
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Saving what ever amount of money on each board was additional profit in the pockets of Genesi and less capital outlay of funds to manufacture the Efika. It is just too bad that it did not make economic sense to make a smaller production run of the Efika with the maximum 512mb of RAM installed so the MorphOS users would have had a choice between the 128mb and 512mb boards.
I'm sorry but this is not the way it happens. I began to look into hardware myself lately, so let's give an example: let's say you have 150k (?,$, whatever it doesnt' matter) initial budget and you want to design the motherboard of your dreams. Let's say for the sake of argument that the PCB design phase with prototypes will cost you arount 80k? (it can be lower or higher, depending on the design of course). The factory tells you that production runs happen in batches of 500 -or similar quantity, for technical reasons but also for parts price reasons- , so you have to see that the remaining money (70k?) will last for the production AND the parts. For 500 units, this means you have to make sure that the cost/unit will cost at most 140?. But you're short of some cash, so you have to change the design and lower the specs somewhat. Now this varies greatly depending on the PCB, but let's say that RAM is easy to dismiss, because RAM chips are expensive and more expendable, the RAM capacity is variable. In an embedded board where most peripherals is on a SoC, you can't dismiss ethernet, you can't dismiss audio, you can't dismiss the CPU(!), so you have to take down on RAM.
Well, theoretically, you could lower your profits and use that amount to increase RAM, but that's really bad, bad, bad business practice. A product that doesn't make a profit is doomed to fail.
Disclaimer: I don't really know what happened with the Efika, and this is NOT an explanation of why it has only 128MB or RAM (which imho are just fine, the Efika is not a really desktop system). But it's a problem I've come unto myself and I think pretty much everyone that produces soemthing (and software of course, specs minimizing are not only hw-related).
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I know that this is not going to happen, but look at the guy who spent thousands of Euros of his own money to redesign a new 030 motherboard for the A1000. I think stranger things have happened in the world of Amiga over the past 20 years, so anything is possible.
Indeed. But what if it happens? What if someone releases tomorrow or in 6/12 months a modern PPC motherboard that fulfills your wishes? Would everyone here rush out to buy it? I don't think so.
