Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

You have worked this out before so I wonder if you could just remind me what in your considered opinion the annual cpu development costs of Itanium were at its peak and now ?

At the recent peak (Tukwila physical design concurrent with Poulson
uarch development) it was probably on the order of $200m-$300m per
year. Now it is probably less than $10m (Kittson now seems to be a
rebadged/speed bumped, hidden feature enabled Poulson) which is
basically manufacturing/test support. AFAIK FTC moved onto other
things about a year ago when HP refused to fund a 22 nm Kittson.

Considering how fast the Unix market is fading away it looks like
it might have been a good call. Certainly IBM seems anxious to cut
back on its semi/processor R&D costs.